GERMANY AND THE GERMANS

FROM AN AMERICAN POINT OF VIEW

BY PRICE COLLIER

CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS NEW YORK 1913

Copyright, 1913, by Charles Scribner’s Sons

Published May, 1913

To MY WIFE KATHARINE whose deserving far outstrips my giving

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

The first printed suggestion that America should be called America came from a German. Martin Waldseemüller, of Freiburg, in his Cosmographiae Introductio, published in 1507, wrote: “I do not see why any one may justly forbid it to be named after Americus, its discoverer, a man of sagacious mind, Amerige, that is the land of Americus or America, since both Europe and Asia derived their names from women.”

The first complete ship-load of Germans left Gravesend July the 24th, 1683, and arrived in Philadelphia October the 6th, 1683. They settled in Germantown, or, as it was then called, on account of the poverty of the settlers, Armentown.

Up to within the last few years the majority of our settlers have been Teutonic in blood and Protestant in religion. The English, Dutch, Swedes, Germans, Scotch-Irish, who settled in America, were all, less than two thousand years ago, one Germanic race from the country surrounding the North Sea.

Since 1820 more than 5,200,000 Germans have settled in America. This immigration of Germans has practically ceased, and it is a serious loss to America, for it has been replaced by a much less desirable type of settler. In 1882 western Europe sent us 563,174 settlers, or 87 per cent., while southern and eastern Europe and Asiatic Turkey sent 83,637, or 13 per cent. In 1905 western Europe sent 215,863, or 21.7 per cent., and southern and eastern Europe and Asiatic Turkey, 808,856, or 78.9 per cent. of our new population. In 1910 there were 8,282,618 white persons of German origin in the United States; 2,501,181 were born in Germany; 3,911,847 were born in the United States, both of whose parents were born in Germany; 1,869,590 were born in the United States, one parent born in the United States and one in Germany.

Not only have we been enriched by this mass of sober and industrious people in the past, but Peter Mühlenberg, Christopher Ludwig, Steuben, John Kalb, George Herkimer, and later Francis Lieber, Carl Schurz, Sigel, Osterhaus, Abraham Jacobi, Herman Ridder, Oswald Ottendorfer, Adolphus Busch, Isidor, Nathan, and Oscar Straus, Jacob Schiff, Otto Kahn, Frederick Weyerheuser, Charles P. Steinmetz, Claus Spreckels, Hugo Münsterberg, and a catalogue of others, have been leaders in finance, in industry, in war, in politics, in educational and philanthropic enterprises, and in patriotism.

The framework of our republican institutions, as I have tried to outline in this volume, came from the “Woods of Germany.” Professor H. A. L. Fisher, of Oxford, writes: “European republicanism, which ever since the French Revolution has been in the main a phenomenon of the Latin races, was a creature of Teutonic civilization in the age of the sea-beggars and the Roundheads. The half-Latin city of Geneva was the source of that stream of democratic opinion in church and state, which, flowing to England under Queen Elizabeth, was repelled by persecution to Holland, and thence directed to the continent of North America.”

In these later days Goethe, in a letter to Eckermann, prophesied the building of the Panama Canal by the Americans, and also the prodigious growth of the United States toward the West.

In a private collection in New York, is an autograph letter of George Washington to Frederick the Great, asking that Frederick should use his influence to protect that French friend of America, Lafayette.

In Schiller’s house in Weimar there still hangs an engraving of the battle of Bunker Hill, by Müller, a German, and a friend of the poet.

Bismarck’s intimate friend as a student at Göttingen, and the man of whom he spoke with warm affection all his life, was the American historian Motley.

The German soldiers in our Civil War were numbered by the thousands. We have many ties with Germany, quite enough, indeed, to make a bare enumeration of them a sufficient introduction to this volume.

On more than one occasion of late I have been introduced in places, and to persons where a slight picture of what I was to meet when the doors were thrown open was of great help to me. I was told beforehand something of the history, traditions, the forms and ceremonies, and even something of the weaknesses and peculiarities of the society, the persons, and the personages. I am not so wise a guide as some of my sponsors have been, but it is something of the kind that I have wished and planned to do for my countrymen. I have tried to make this book, not a guidebook, certainly not a history; rather, in the words of Bacon, “grains of salt, which will rather give an appetite than offend with satiety,” a sketch, in short, of what is on the other side of the great doors when the announcer speaks your name and you enter Germany.

GERMANY AND THE GERMANS

FROM AN AMERICAN POINT OF VIEW

I THE CRADLE OF MODERN GERMANY

Eighty-one years before the discovery of America, seventy-two years before Luther was born, and forty-one years before the discovery of printing, in the year 1411, the Emperor Sigismund, the betrayer of Huss, transferred the Mark of Brandenburg to his faithful vassal and cousin, Frederick, sixth Burgrave of Nuremberg. Nuremberg was at one time one of the great trading towns between Germany, Venice, and the East, and the home later of Hans Sachs. Frederick was the lineal descendant of Conrad of Hohenzollern, the first Burgrave of Nuremberg, who lived in the days of Frederick Barbarossa (1152-1189); and this Conrad is the twenty-fifth lineal ancestor of Emperor William II of Germany. It is interesting to remember in this connection that when we count back our progenitors to the twenty-first generation they number something over two millions. When we trace an ancestry so far, therefore, we must know something of the multitude from which the individual is descended, if we are to gather anything of value concerning his racial characteristics. The solace of all genealogical investigation is the infallible discovery, that the greatest among us began in a small way.

If you paddle up the Elbe and the Havel from Hamburg to Potsdam, you will find yourself in the territory conquered from the heathen Wends in the days of Henry I, the Fowler (918-935), which was the cradle of what is now the German Empire.

The Emperor Sigismund, who was often embarrassed financially by reason of his wars and journeyings had borrowed some four hundred thousand gold florins from Frederick, and it was in settlement of this debt that he mortgaged the territory of Brandenburg, and on the 8th of April, 1417, the ceremony of enfeoffment was performed at Constance, by which the House of Hohenzollern became possessed of this territory, and was thereafter included among the great electorates having a vote in the election of the Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire.

It was Henricus Auceps, or Henry the Fowler, (so called because the envoys sent to offer him the crown, found him on his estates in the Hartz Mountains among his falcons), who fought off the Danes in the northwest, and the Slavonians, or Wends, in the northeast, and the Hungarians in the southeast, and established frontier posts or marks for permanent protection against their ravages. These marks, or marches, which were boundary lines, were governed by markgrafs or marquises, and finally gave the name of marks to the territory itself. The word is historically familiar from its still later use in noting the old boundaries between England and Scotland, and England and Wales, which are still called marks.

Henry the Fowler was also called Henry “the City Builder.” After the death of the last of the Charlemagne line of rulers, the Franks elected Conrad, Duke of Franconia, to succeed to the throne, and he on his death-bed advised his people to choose Henry of Saxony to succeed, for the times were stormy and the country needed a strong ruler. The Hungarians in the southeast, and the Wends, the old Slavonic population of Poland, were pillaging and harrying more and more successfully, and the more successfully the more impudently. Henry began the building of strong-walled, deep-moated cities along his frontier, and made one, drawn by lot, out of every ten families of the countryside, go to live in these fortified towns. Their rulers were burgraves, or city counts. Titles now so largely ornamental were then descriptive of duties and responsibilities.

In the light of their future greatness, it is well to take note of these two frontier counties, or marches. The first, called the Northern March, or March of Brandenburg, was the religious centre of the Slays, and was situated in the midst of forests and marshes just beyond the Elbe. This March of Brandenburg was won from the Slays in the first instance by the Saxons and Franks of the Saxon plain. When the burgrave, Frederick of Hohenzollern, came to take possession of his new territory he was received with the jesting remark: “Were it to rain burgraves for a whole year, we should not allow them to grow in the march.” But Frederick’s soldiers and money, and his Nuremberg jewels, as his cannon were called, ended by gaining complete control, a control in more powerful hands to-day than ever before.

The second, called the Eastern or Austrian March, was situated in the basin of the Danube. These two great states were formed in lands that had ceased to be German and had become Slav or Finnish territory. The fighting appetite of the German tribes, and the spirit of chivalry later, which had drawn men in other days in France to the East, in Spain against the Moors, in Normandy against England, were offered an opportunity and an outlet in Germany, by forays and fighting against the Finns and Slays.

Out of the conquest and settlement of these territories grew, what we know to-day, as the German Empire and the Austrian Empire. Out of their margraves, who were at first sentinel officers guarding the outer boundaries of the empire, and mere nominees of the Emperor, have developed the Emperor of Germany and the Emperor of Austria, the one ruling over the most powerful nation, the other the head of the most exclusive court, in Europe.

When a man becomes a power in the world, these days, our first impulse is to ask about his ancestry. Who were his father and his mother; what and who were his grandfathers and grandmothers, and who were their forebears. Where did they come from, what was the climate; did they live by the sea, or in the mountains, or in the plains. We are at once hot on the trail of his success. Be he an American, we wish to know whether his people came from Holland, from France, from England, or from Belgium; where did they settle, in New England, in New York, or in the South. We no longer accept ability as a miracle, but investigate it as an evolution. If the man be great enough, cities vie with each other to claim him as their child; he acquires an Homeric versatility in cradles.

Whatever one may think of William II of Germany, he is just now the predominating figure in Europe, if not in the world. This must be our excuse for a word or two concerning the race from which came his twenty-fifth lineal ancestor.

It is exactly five hundred years since his present empire was founded in the sandy plains about the Elbe, and a thousand years before that brings us to the dim dawn of any historical knowledge whatever about the Germans. When the Cimbrians and Teutonians came into contact with the Romans, in 113 B. C., is the beginning of all things for these people. In that year the inhabitants of the north of Italy awoke one morning to find a swarm of blue-eyed, light-haired, long-limbed strangers coming down from the Alps upon them. The younger and more light-hearted warriors came tobogganing down the snow-covered mountain-sides on their shields. They had been crowded out of what is now Switzerland, and called themselves, though they were much alike in appearance, the Cimbri and the Teutones. They defeated the Roman armies sent against them, and, turning to the south and west, went on their way along the north shores of the Mediterranean into what is now France. They had no history of their own. Tacitus writes that they could neither read nor write: “Literarum secreta viri pariter ac feminae ignorant.” Very little is to be found concerning them in the Roman writers. The books of Pliny which treated of this time are lost. It was toward the middle of the century before Christ that Caesar advanced to the frontier of what may be called Germany. He met and conquered there these men of the blood who were to conquer Rome, and to carry on the name under the title of the Holy Roman Empire. Caesar met the ancestors of those who were to be Caesars, and with an eye on Roman politics, wrote the “Commentaries,” which were really autobiographical messages, with the Germans as a text and an excuse.

Tacitus, born just about one hundred years after the death of Caesar, and who had access to the lost works of Pliny, was a moralist historian and a warm friend of the Germans. Over their shoulders he rapped the manners and morals of his own countrymen. “Vice is not treated by the Germans” (German, the etymologists say, is composed of Ger, meaning spear or lance, and Man, meaning chief or lord; Deutsch, or Teutsch, comes from the Gothic word Thiudu, meaning nation, and a Deutscher, or Teutscher, meant one belonging to the nation), he tells his countrymen, “as a subject of raillery, nor is the profligacy of corrupting and being corrupted called the fashion of the age.” With Rooseveltian enthusiasm he writes that the Germans consider it a crime “to set limits to population, by rearing up only a certain number of children and destroying the rest.”

The republicanism of Europe and America had its roots in this Teutonic civilization. “No man dictates to the assembly; he may persuade but cannot command. When anything is advanced not agreeable to the people, they reject it with a general murmur. If the proposition pleases, they brandish their javelins. This is their highest and most honorable mark of applause; they assent in a military manner, and praise by the sound of their arms,” continues our author.

The great historian of the Roman historians, and of Rome, Gibbon, lends his authority to this praise of Tacitus in the sentence: “The most civilized nations of modern Europe issued from the woods of Germany; and in the rude institutions of those barbarians we may still distinguish the original principles of our present laws and manners.”

Rome, which was not only a city, a nation, an empire, but a religion; Rome, which replied to a suggestion that the people of Latium should be admitted to citizenship, “Thou hast heard, O Jupiter, the impious words that have come from this man’s mouth. Canst thou tolerate, O Jupiter, that a foreigner should come to sit in the sacred temple as a senator, as a consul?” Rome welcomed later the barbarians from the woods of Germany not only as citizens and consuls, but as emperors; and their descendants rule the world.

It was no Capuan training that finally distilled itself in a Charlemagne, an Otho, a Luther, a Frederick the Great, and a Bismarck; in an Alfred, a William the Conqueror, a Cromwell, a Clive, a Rhodes, or a Gordon; in a Washington, a Lincoln, a Grant, a Jackson, and a Lee.

Beyond the certified beyond, we see dimly through the mists of history, hosts of men marching, ever marching from the east, spreading some toward Norway and Sweden, some skirting the Baltic Sea to the south; driving their cattle before them, and learning the arts of peace and war, and self-government, from the harsh school-masters of pressing needs and tyrannical circumstances, the only teachers that confer degrees of permanent value. They become fishermen and small landholders in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark. “Jeudi,” or Jupiter’s day, becomes their god Thor’s day, or Thursday; “Mardi,” or Mars’s day, is their Tiu’s day, or Tuesday; “Mercredi,” or Mercury’s day, is Odin’s or Woden’s day, or Wednesday.

These men trained to solitude in small bands, owing to the geographical exigencies of their northern country, become the founders of the particularist or individualistic nations, Great Britain and the United States among others. Those who had gone south, driven by pressure from behind, follow the Danube to the north and west, find the Rhine, and push on into what is now southwestern Europe.

It is worth noting that the Rhine and the Danube have their sources near together, and form a line of water from the North Sea to the Black Sea, a significant line in Europe from the beginning down to this day. This line of water divides not only lands but nations, manners, customs, and even speech, and what we call the North, and what we call the South, may be said to be, with negligible exceptions, what is north and what is south of those two rivers. It is and always has been the Mason and Dixon’s line of Europe.

All of these peoples mould their institutions, from the habits and customs forced upon them by their surroundings. The members of the tribe of the Suevi, now Swabians, were not allowed to hold fixed landed possessions, but were forced to exchange with each other from time to time, so that no one should become wedded to the soil and grow rich thereby. Readers of history will remember, that Lycurgus attempted similar legislation among the Spartans, hoping thus to keep them simple and hardy, and fit for war.

How many hundreds of years, these various tribes were working out their rude political and domestic laws, no man knows. The imaginative historian pushes his way through the mists, and sees that the tribes who lived in the Scandinavian peninsula were forced by their cramped territory to become fishermen and sailors, and cultivators of small areas of land, accustomed therefore to rule themselves in small groups, and hence independent and markedly individualist. Such historians divide even these rude tribes sharply between the patriarchal and the particularist. The particularist commune developed from the estate which was self-sufficient, isolated, and independent. When they were associated together it was for special and limited purposes, so that independence might be infringed upon to the least possible extent. The patriarchal commune, on the other hand, proceeded from the communal family which provided everything for everybody. It was a general and compulsory partnership, monopolizing every kind of business that might arise. The particularist group then, and their moral and political descendants now, strive to organize public authority, and public life in such a way, that they are distinctly subordinate to private and individual independence. In the one the Emperor is the father of the family - the Russian Emperor is still called “Little Father” - the independence of each member of the family is swallowed up in the complete authority of the head of the national family; in the other the president, or constitutional king, is the executive servant of independent citizens, to whom he owes as much allegiance as they owe to him.

In Saxony, to-day, more than ninety per cent. of the agricultural population are independent peasant proprietors, and the most admirable and successful agriculturists in the world. It is said indeed that the Curia Regis, which is the Latinized form of the Witenagemote, or assembly of wise men, of the Norman and Angevin kings, is the foundation of the common law of England, and the common law of England is the law of more than half of the civilized world.

Whatever the varieties and distinctions of government anywhere in the world, these two differences are the fundamental and basic differences, upon which all forms of government have been built up and developed.

In the one, everything so far as possible is begun and carried on by individual initiative; in the other the state gradually takes control of all enterprise. The philosophy of the one is based upon the saying: love one another; the political philosophy of the other is based upon the assumption that men are not brethren, but beasts and mechanical toys, who can only be governed by legislation and the police. The ideal of the one is the good Samaritan, the ideal of the other is the tax-collector. The one depends upon the wine and oil of sympathy and human brotherhood; the other claims that the right to an iron bed in a hospital, and the services of a state-paid and indifferent physician, are “refreshing fruit,” as though sympathy and consideration, which are what our weaker brethren most need, could be distilled from taxes!

It is claimed for these Teutonic tribes, that those of them which drifted down from the Scandinavian peninsula, are the blood and moral ancestors of the particularist nations now in the ascendant in the world. The love of independent self-government, born of the geographical necessities of the situation, stamped itself upon these people so indelibly, that Englishmen and Americans bear the seal to this day. This change from the patriarchal to the particularist family took place in this German race, and took place not in those who came from the Baltic plain, but in those who came from the Saxon plain.

The tribes from the Baltic plain, the Goths, for example, merely overran the Roman civilization, spread over it; drowned it in superior numbers, and with superior valor; but it was the Germans from the Scandinavian peninsula who conquered Rome, and conquered her not by force alone, but by offering to the world a superior social and political organization. It was to this branch of the German race that Varus lost his legions, at the place where the Ems has its source, at the foot of the Teutoburger Wald. Charlemagne was of these, and his name Karl, or Kerl, or peasant, and the fact that his title is the only one in the world compounded of greatness and the people in equal measure, is the pith of what the Germans brought to leaven the whole political world. He made the common man so great, that the world has consented to his unique and superlative baptismal title of Karl the Great, or Carolus Magnus, or Charlemagne.

The pivotal fact to be remembered is that these German tribes saved Europe by their love of liberty, and by their virility, from the decadence of an orientalized Rome. Rome, and all Rome meant, was not destroyed by these ancestors of ours; on the contrary, they saved what was best worth saving from the decline and fall of Rome, and made out of it with their own vigorous laws a new world, the modern western world. Great Britain, Germany, and the United States are not descended from Egypt, Greece, or Rome, but from “those barbarians who issued from the woods of Germany.”

Every school-boy should be taught that Rome died of a disease contracted from contact with the Oriental, the Syrian, the Jew, the Greek, the riffraff of the eastern and southern shores of the Mediterranean; who, by the way, make up the bulk of the immigration into America at this time. Rome was an incurable invalid long before the Germans took control of the western world and saved it.

When the Roman Emperor Augustus died, in 14 A. D., to be succeeded by Tiberius, the Roman Empire was bounded on the north and east by the Rhine, the Danube, the Black Sea and its southern territory, and Syria; by all the known country from the Red Sea to the Atlantic Ocean in northern Africa on the south; and by the Atlantic Ocean as far north as the river Elbe on the west. Five hundred years later, about 500 A. D., the Barbarians, as they were called, had thrust aside the Roman Empire. The Saxons controlled the southern and eastern coasts of England; the Franks were rulers in the whole country from the Loire to the Elbe; south of them the Visigoths ruled Spain; Italy and all the country to the north and east of the Adriatic, as far as the Danube, were in the hands of the Ostrogoths. The Roman Empire had been pushed to the eastern end of the Mediterranean, with its capital at Constantinople.

In another three hundred years, or in 800 A. D., the king of one of these German tribes revived the title of Roman Emperor, was crowned by the Pope, Leo III, and governed Europe as Charlemagne. His banner with the double-headed eagle, representing the two empires of Germany and Rome, is the standard of Germany to-day. Charles Martel, who led the West against the East, defeating the Arabs in the country between what is now Tours and Poitiers, was Charlemagne’s grandfather. What is now western Europe, became the home and the consolidated kingdom of the German tribes who had drifted down from the west of the Baltic, and into the Saxon plain. They had become masters in this territory: after victories over the Mongolian tribes, and the Huns under Attila, who had conquered and plundered as far as Strasburg, Worms, and Treves, and were finally defeated near what is now Chalons; after driving off the Arabs under Charles the Hammer (732); after imposing their rule upon the Roman Empire, the remains of which cowered in Constantinople, where the Ottoman Turk took even that from it in 1453, which date may well be taken as marking the beginning of modern history, and became themselves thereafter one of the first powers in Christian Europe; a power which is now, in 1912, the quarrel ground of the Western powers.

These are Brobdingnagian strides through history, to reach the days of Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio, Chaucer, Froissart, and the first translation of the Bible into a vulgar tongue by Wickliffe, to the days when Lorenzo de Medici breathed Greece into Europe, and the feeling for beauty changed from invalidism to convalescence; to the days when cannon were first used, printing invented, America discovered, and the man Luther, who gave the Germans their present language by his translation of the Bible, and who delivered us from papal tyranny, born; and Agincourt, and Joan of Arc, are picturesque and poignant features of the historical landscape.

These rude German tribes had been welded by hardship and warfare, into compact and self-governing bodies. These loosely bound masses of men, women, and children, straggling down to find room and food, are now, in 1400 A. D., France, England, Austria, Germany, Scotland, and Spain. The same spirit and vigor that roamed the coasts all the way from Sweden and Norway to the mouth of the Thames, and to the Rhine, the Seine, and to the Straits of Gibraltar, are abroad again, landing on the shores of America, circumnavigating Africa, and bringing home tales of Indians in the west, and Indians in the east. This virile stock that had been hammered and hewn was now to be polished; and in Italy, France, England, and Germany grew up a passion for translating the rough mythology, and the fierce fancy of the north, into painting, building, poetry, and music.

France, Germany, England, Spain, Holland, Belgium, Italy, too, grew out of these German tribes, who poured down from the territory roughly included between the Rhine, the North Sea, the Oder, and the Danube.

As we know these countries to-day, the definite thing about them is their difference. You cross the channel in fifty minutes from Dover to Calais, you cross the Rhine in five minutes, and the peoples seem thousands of miles apart. “How did it happen,” asks Voltaire, “that, setting out from the same point of departure, the governments of England and of France arrived at nearly the same time, at results as dissimilar as the constitution of Venice is unlike that of Morocco?”

One might ask as well how it happened, that the speech of one German invasion mixing itself with Latin became French, of another Spanish, of another Portuguese, of another Italian, of another English. These are interesting inquiries, and in regard to the former it is not difficult to see, that men grew to be governed differently, according as the geographical exigencies of their homes were different, and as they occupied themselves differently.

The observant traveller in the United States, may see for himself what differences even a few years of differing climate, and circumstances, and custom will produce. The inhabitants of Charleston, South Carolina, are evidently and visibly different from those in Davenport, Iowa. Two towns of similar size and wealth, Salisbury, Maryland, and Hingham, Massachusetts, are almost as different, except in speech, and even in speech the accent is perceptibly different even to the careless listener, as though Salisbury were in the south of France, and Hingham in the north of Germany. These changes and differences are only inexplicable, to those who will not see the ethnographical miracles taking place under their noses. Look at the mongrel crowd on Fifth Avenue at midday, and remember what was there only fifty years ago, and the differentiation which has taken place in Europe due to climate, intermarriage, laws, and customs seems easy to trace and to explain.

The fishermen and tillers of the soil in the Scandinavian peninsula, afterward the settlers in the Saxon plain and in England, recognized him who ruled over their settled place of abode as king; while roaming bands of fighting men would naturally attach themselves to the head of the tribe, as the leader in war, and recognize him as king. As late as the death of Charlemagne, when his powerful grip relaxed, the tribes of Germans, for they were little more even then, fell apart again. Another family like that of Pepin arose under Robert the Strong, and under Hugue Capet (987) acquired the title of Kings of France. The monarchy grew out of the weakening of feudalism, and feudalism had been the gradual setting, in law and custom, of a way of living together, of these detached tribes and clans, and their chiefs.

A powerful warrior was rewarded with a horse, a spear; later, when territory was conquered and the tribe settled down, land was given as a reward. Land, however, does not die like a horse, or wear out and get broken like a spear, and the problem arises after the death of the owner, as to who is his rightful heir. Does it revert to the giver, the chief of the tribe, or does it go to the children of the owner? Some men are strong enough to keep their land, to add to it, to control those living upon it, and such a one becomes a feudal ruler in a small way himself. He becomes a duke, a dux or leader, a count, a margrave, a baron, and a few such powerful men stand by one another against the king. A Charlemagne, a William the Conqueror, a Louis XIV is strong enough to rule them and keep them in order for a time. Out of these conditions grow limited monarchies or absolute monarchies and national nobilities.

More than any other one factor, the Crusades broke up feudalism. The great noble, impelled by a sense of religious duty, or by a love of adventure, arms himself and his followers, and starts on years of journeyings to the Holy Land. Ready money is needed above all else. Lands are mortgaged, and the money-lender and the merchant buy lands, houses, and eventually power, and buy them cheap. The returning nobles find their affairs in disarray, their fields cultivated by new owners, towns and cities grow up that are as strong or stronger than the castle. Before the Crusades no roturier, or mere tiller of the soil, could hold a fief, but the demand for money was so great that fiefs were bought and sold, and Philippe Auguste (1180) solved the problem by a law, declaring that when the king invested a man with a sufficient holding of land or fief, he became ipso facto a noble. This is the same common-sense policy which led Sir Robert Peel to declare, that any man with an income of $50,000 a year had a right to a peerage. There can be no aristocracy except of the powerful, which lasts. The difference to-day is seen in the puppet nobility of Austria, Italy, Spain, and Germany as compared with the nobility of England, which is not a nobility of birth or of tradition, but of the powerful: brewers and bankers, and statesmen and lawyers, and leaders of public opinion, covering their humble past with ermine, and crowning their achievements with coronets.

The Crusades brought about as great a shifting of the balance of power, as did later the rise of the rich merchants, industrials, and nabobs in England. As the power of the nobles decreased, the central power or the power of the kings increased; increased indeed, and lasted, down to the greatest crusade of all, when democracy organized itself, and marched to the redemption of the rights of man as man, without regard to his previous condition of servitude.

During the thousand years between the time when we first hear of the German tribes, in 113 B. C., and the year 1411, which marks the beginnings of what is now the Prussian monarchy, customs were becoming habits, and habits were becoming laws, and the political and social origins of the life of our day were being beaten into shape, by the exigencies of living together of these tribes in the woods of Germany.

There it was that the essence of democracy was distilled. Democracy, Demos, the crowd, the people, the nation, were already, in the woods of Germany, the court of last resort. They growled dissent, and they gave assent with the brandishing of their weapons, javelins, or ballots. They were called together but seldom, and between the meetings of the assembly, the executive work, the judicial work, the punishing of offenders, was left to a chosen few; left to those who by their control over themselves, their control over their families, their control over their neighbors, seemed best qualified to exercise the delegated control of all.

The chief aim of their organized government, such as it was, seems to have been to leave themselves free to go about their private business, with as little interference from the demands of public business as possible. The chief concern of each one was to secure his right to mind his own business, under certain safeguards provided by all. If those delegated to govern became autocratic, or evil-doers, or used their power for self-advancement or self-enrichment, they were speedily brought to book. The philosophy of government, then, was to make men free to go about their private business. That the time might come when politics would be the absorbing business of all, dictating the hours and wages of men under the earth, and reaching up to the institution of a recall for the angel Gabriel, and a referendum for the Day of Judgment, was undreamed of. The chiefs of the clans, the chiefs of the tribes, the kings of the Germans, and finally the emperors were all elective. The divine right of kings is a purely modern development. The descendants of these German tribes in England, elected their king in the days of William the Conqueror even, and as late as 1689 the Commons of England voted that King James had abdicated, and that the throne was vacant!

The so-called mayors of the palace, who became kings, were in their day representatives of the landholders, delegates of the people, who advised the king and aided in commanding the armies. These hereditary mayors of the palace drifted into ever greater and greater control, until they became hereditary kings. The title was only hereditary, however, because it was convenient that one man of experience in an office should be succeeded by another educated to, and familiar with, the same experiences and duties, and this system of heredity continues down to this day in business, and in many professions and so long as there is freedom to oust the incompetent, it is a good system. There can never be any real progress until the sons take over the accumulated wisdom and experience of the fathers; if this is not done, then each one must begin for himself all over again. The hereditary principle is sound enough, so long as there is freedom of decapitation in cases of tyranny or folly.

There has continued all through the history of those of the blood of the German tribes, whether in Germany, England, America, Norway, Sweden, or Denmark, the sound doctrine that ability may at any time take the place of the rights of birth. Power, or command, or leadership by heredity is looked upon as a convenience, not as an unimpeachable right.

Charlemagne (742-814), a descendant of a mayor of the palace who had become king by virtue of ability, swept all Europe under his sway by reason of his transcendent powers as a warrior and administrator. He did for the first time for Europe what Akbar did in his day for India. In forty-five years he headed fifty-three campaigns against all sorts of enemies. He fought the Saxons, the Danes, the Slays, the Arabs, the Greeks, and the Bretons. What is now France, Germany, Belgium, Holland, Switzerland, Spain, and most of Italy were under his kingship. He was a student, an architect, a bridge-builder, though he could neither read nor write, and even began a canal which was to connect the Danube and the Rhine, and thus the German Ocean, with the Black Sea. He is one of many monuments to the futility of technical education and mere book-learning.

The Pope, roughly handled, because negligently protected, by the Roman emperors, turns to Charlemagne, and on Christmas Day (800) places a crown upon his head, and proclaims him “Caesar Augustus” and “Christianissimus Rex.” The empire of Rome is to be born again with this virile German warrior at its head. Just a thousand years later, another insists that he has succeeded to the title by right of conquest, and gives his baby son the title of “King of Rome,” and just a thousand years after the death of Charlemagne, in 814, Napoleon retires to Elba. There is a witchery about Rome even to-day, and an emperor still sits imprisoned there, claiming for himself the right to rule the spiritual and intellectual world: “sedet, eternumque sedebit Infelix Theseus.”

Louis, called “the Pious,” because the latter part of his life was spent in mourning his outrageous betrayal, mutilation, and murder of his own nephew, whose rivalry he feared, succeeded his father, Charlemagne. He was succeeded again by his three sons, Lothair, Pepin, and Louis by his first wife, and Charles, who was his favorite son, by his second wife. He had already divided the great heritage left him by Charlemagne between his three sons Lothair, Pepin, and Louis; but now he wished to make another division into four parts, to make room for, and to give a kingdom to, his son Charles by his second wife. The three elder sons revolt against their father, and his last years are spent in vain attempts to reconcile his quarrelsome children. At his death war breaks out. Pepin dies, leaving, however, a son Pepin to inherit his kingdom of Aquitaine. Louis and Charles attempt to take his kingdom from him, his uncle Lothair defends him, and at the great battle of Fontenay (841) Louis and Charles defeat Lothair. Lothair gains the adherence of the Saxons, and Charles and Louis at the head of their armies confirm their alliance, and at Strasburg the two armies take the oath of allegiance: the followers of Louis took the oath in German, the followers of Charles in French, and this oath, the words of which are still preserved, is the earliest specimen of the French language in existence.

In 843 another treaty signed at Verdun, between the two brothers Lothair and Louis and their half-brother Charles, separated for the first time the Netherlands, the Rhine country, Burgundy, and Italy, which became the portion of Lothair; all Germany east of this territory, which went to Louis; and all the territory to the west of it, which went to Charles. Germany and France, therefore, by the Treaty of Verdun in 843, became distinct kingdoms, and modern geography in Europe is born.

From the death of Henry the Fowler, in 936, down to the nomination of Frederick I of Bavaria, sixth Burgrave of Nuremberg, to be Margrave of Brandenburg, in 1411, the history of the particular Germany we are studying is swallowed up in the history of these German tribes of central Europe and of the Holy Roman Empire. It is in these years of the seven Crusades, from 1095 to the last in 1248; of Frederick Barbarossa; of the centuries-long quarrel between the Welfs, or Guelphs, and the Waiblingers, or Ghibellines, which were for years in Italy, and are still in Germany, political parties; of the Hanseatic League of the cities to protect commerce from the piracies of a disordered and unruled country; of the Dane and the Norman descents upon the coasts of France, Germany, and England, and of their burning, killing, and carrying into captivity; of the Saracens scouring the Mediterranean coasts and sacking Rome itself; of the Wends and Czechs, Hungarian bands who dashed in upon the eastern frontiers of the now helpless and amorphous empire of Charlemagne, all the way from the Baltic to the Danube; of the quarrel between Henry IV and that Jupiter Ecclesiasticus, Hildebrand, or Gregory VII, who has left us his biography in the single phrase, “To go to Canossa”; of Genghis Khan and his Mongol hordes; of the long fight between popes and emperors over the right of investiture; of Rudolph of Hapsburg; of the throwing off of their allegiance to the Empire of the Kings of Burgundy, Poland, Hungary, and Denmark; of the settlement of the question of the legal right to elect the emperor by Charles IV, who fixed the power in the persons of seven rulers: the King of Bohemia, the Count Palatine of the Rhine, the Duke of Saxony, the Margraf of Brandenburg, and the three Archbishops of Mayence, Treves, and Cologne; of the independence of the great cities of northern Italy; of Otto the Great, whose first wife was a granddaughter of Alfred the Great, and who was the real founder of the Holy Roman Empire, in the sense that a German prince rules over both Germany and Italy with the approval of the Pope, and in the sense that he, a duke of Saxony, appropriates the western empire (962), goes to Rome, delivers the Pope, subdues Italy, and fixes the imperial crown in the name and nation of Germany; of the beginning of that hope of a world-church and a world-state, of a universal church and a universal kingdom, which took form in what is known as the Holy Roman Empire; of that greatest of all forgeries, the Donation of Constantine by the monk Isidor, discovered and revealed by Cardinal Nicolaus, of Cura, in which it is pretended that Constantine handed over Rome to the Pope and his successors forever, with all the power and privileges of the Caesars, and of the effects of this, the most successful lie ever told in the world, during the seven hundred years it was believed: it is in these years of turbulence and change that one must trace the threads of history, from the first appearance of the Germans, down to the time when what is now Prussia became a frontier post of the empire under the rule of a Hohenzollern.

It is, perhaps, of all periods in history, the most interesting to Americans, for then and there our civilization was born. Writing of the conquest of the British Isles by the Germans, J. R. Green says: “What strikes us at once in the new England is this, that it was the one purely German nation that rose upon the wreck of Rome. In other lands, in Spain or Gaul or Italy, though they were equally conquered by German peoples, religion, social life, administrative order, still remained Roman.” The roots of our civilization, are to be dug for in those days when the German peoples met the imperialism and the Christianity of Rome, and absorbed and renewed them. The Roman Empire, tottering on a foundation of, it is said, as many as fifty million slaves - even a poor man would have ten slaves, a rich man ten or twenty thousand - and overrun with the mongrel races from Syria, Greece, and Africa, and hiding away the remnants of its power in the Orient, became in a few centuries an easy prey to our ancestors “of the stern blue eyes, the ruddy hair, the large and robust bodies.”

“Caerula quis stupuit lumina? flavam
Caesariem, et madido torquentem cornua cirro?
Nempe quod haec illis natura est omnibus una,”

writes Juvenal of their resemblance to one another.

By the year 1411 long strides had been made toward other forms of social, political, religious, and commercial life, due to the German grip upon Europe. Dante, whose grandmother was a Goth, was not only a poet but a fighter for freedom, taking a leading part in the struggle of the Bianchi against the Neri and Pope Boniface, was born in 1265 and died in 1321; Francis of Assisi, born in 1182, not only represented a democratic influence in the church, but led the earliest revolt against the despotism of money; the movement to found cities and to league cities together for the furtherance of trade and industry, and thus to give rights to whole classes of people hitherto browbeaten by church or state or both, began in Italy; and the alliance of the cities of the Rhine, and the Hansa League, date from the beginning of the thirteenth century; the discovery of how to make paper dates from this time, and printing followed; the revolt of the Albigenses against priestly dominance which drenched the south of France in blood began in the twelfth century; slavery disappeared except in Spain; Wycliffe, born in 1324, translated the Gospels, threw off his allegiance to the papacy, and suffered the cheap vengeance of having his body exhumed and its ashes scattered in the river Swift; Aquinas and Duns Scotus delivered philosophy from the tyranny of theology; Roger Bacon (1214) practically introduced the study of natural science; Magna Charta was signed in 1215; Marco Polo, whose statue I have seen among those of the gods, in a certain Chinese temple, began his travels in the thirteenth century; the university of Bologna was founded before 1200 for the untrammelled study of medicine and philosophy; Abelard, who died in 1142, represented, to put it pithily, the spirit of free inquiry in matters theological, and lectured to thousands in Paris. What do these men and movements mean? I am wofully wrong in my ethnographical calculations if these things do not mean, that the people of whom Tacitus wrote, “No man dictates to the assembly; he may persuade but cannot command,” were shaping and moulding the life of Europe, with their passionate love of individual liberty, with their sturdy insistence upon the right of men to think and work without arbitrary interference. Out of this furnace came constitutional government in England, and republican government in America. We owe the origins of our political life to the influence of these German tribes, with their love of individual freedom and their stern hatred of meddlesome rulers, or a meddlesome state or legislature.

Germany had no literature at this time. When Froissart was writing French history, and Joinville his delightful chronicles; when Chaucer and Wycliffe were gayly and gravely making play with the monks and priests, the only names known in Germany were those of the mystics, Eckhart and Tauler. When the time came, however, Germany was defiantly individualist in Luther, and Protestantism was thoroughly German. It was not from tales of the great, not from knighthood, chivalry, or their roving singer champions, that German literature came; but from the fables and satires of the people, from Hans Sachs and from the Luther translation of the Bible. This is roughly the setting of civilization, in which the first Hohenzollerns found themselves when they took over the Mark of Brandenburg, in the early years of the fifteenth century.

Here is a list of them, of no great interest in themselves, but showing the direct descent down to the present time; for from the Peace of Westphalia (1648) to the French Revolution the German states were without either men or measures, except Frederick the Great, that call for other than dreary comment:

These incidents, names, and dates are mere whisps of history. It is only necessary to indicate that to articulate this skeleton of history, clothe it with flesh, and give it its appropriate arms and costumes would entail the putting of all mediaeval European history upon a screen, to deliver oneself without apology from any such task. It may be for this reason that there is no history of Germany in the English tongue, that ranks above the elementary and the mediocre. There is a masterly and scholarly history of the Holy Roman Empire by an Englishman, which no student of Germany may neglect, but he who would trace the beginnings of Germany from 113 B. C. down to the time of the Great Elector, 1640, must be his own guide through the trackless deserts, of the formation into separate nations, of modern Europe. It is even with misgivings that the student picks his way from the time of the Great Elector to Bismarck, and to modern Germany.

The Peace of Westphalia, 1648, marks the end of the Thirty Years’ War, and finds Germany with a population reduced from sixteen millions to four millions. Famine which drove men and women to cannibalism, bands of them being caught cooking human bodies in a caldron for food; slaughter that drove men to make laws authorizing every man to have two wives, and punishing men and women who became monks and nuns; lawlessness that bred roving bands of murderers, who killed, robbed, and even ate their victims, demanded a ruler of no little vigor to lead his people back to civic, moral, and material health. The Great Elector wrested east Prussia from Poland, he defeated and drove off the Swedes, whom Louis XIV had drawn into an alliance against him, he travelled from end to end of his country, seeking out the problems of distress and remedying them by inducing immigration from Holland, Switzerland, and the north, by building roads, bridges, schools, and churches, and by encouraging planting, trade, and commerce. He built the Frederick William Canal connecting the Oder and the Spree, and introduced the potato to his countrymen. Germany now produces in normal years fifteen hundred million bushels of potatoes. The splendid equestrian statue of the Great Elector on the long bridge at Berlin, is a worthy monument to the first great Hohenzollern.

When Charles II of Spain died, Louis XIV, the Emperor Leopold I of the Holy Roman Empire, and the Elector of Bavaria, all three claimed the right to name his successor. In the war that followed and which lasted a dozen years, the Emperor, Holland, England, Portugal, the Elector of Hanover, and the Elector Frederick III of Brandenburg, the son of the Great Elector, were allied against France. Frederick, the Elector of Brandenburg, was permitted by the Emperor, in return for his services at this time, to assume the title of King, and he crowned himself and his wife Sophia Elizabeth, at Königsberg, King and Queen of Prussia, taking the title of Frederick I of Prussia, January 18th, 1701.

This novus homo among sovereigns was now a fellow king with the rulers of England, France, Denmark, and Sweden, and the only crowned head in the empire, except the Emperor himself, and the Elector of Saxony, who had been chosen King of Poland in 1697. By persistent sycophancy he had pushed his way into the inner circle of the crowned. Those who have picked social locks these latter days by similar sycophancies, by losses at bridge in the proper quarter, by suffering sly familiarities to their women folk, and by wearing their personal and family dignity in sole leather, may know something of the humiliating experiences of this new monarch. He was a feeble fellow, but his son and successor, Frederick William I, “a shrewd but brutal boor,” so Lord Rosebery calls him, and there could not be a better judge, amazed Europe by his taste for collecting tall soldiers, by his parsimony, his kennel manners in the treatment of his family and his subjects, and leaves a name in history as the first, greatest, and the unique collector of human beings on a Barnumesque scale. All known collectors of birds, beetles, butterflies, and beasts accord him an easy supremacy, for his aggregation of colossal grenadiers.

It is temptingly easy to be epigrammatic, perhaps witty, at the expense of Frederick William I of Prussia. The man, however, who freed the serfs; who readjusted the taxes; who insisted upon industry and honesty among his officials; who proclaimed liberty of conscience and of thought; who first put on, to wear for the rest of his life, the uniform of his army, and thus made every officer proud to wear the uniform himself; and who left his son an army of eighty thousand men, thoroughly equipped and trained, and an overflowing treasury, may not be dismissed merely with anecdotes of his eccentric brutality.

Only the ignorant and the envious, nibble at the successes of other men, with vermin teeth and venomous tongue. Those people who can never praise anything whole-heartedly come by their cautious censure from an uneasy doubt of their own deserving. The contempt of Frederick William I for learning and learned men, left him leisure for matters of far more importance to his kingdom at the time. His habitual roughness to his son was due, perhaps, to the fact that there was a curious strain of effeminate culture in the man who deified Voltaire. Poor Voltaire, who called Shakespeare “le sauvage ivre,” or to quote him exactly: “On croirait que cet ouvrage (Hamlet) est le fruit de l’imagination d’un sauvage ivre,” who said that Dante would never be read, and that the comedies of Aristophanes were unworthy of presentation in a country tavern! One is tempted to believe that the father was a man of robuster judgment in such matters than the son, whose own rather mediocre literary equipment, made him the easy prey of that acidulous vestal of literature, Voltaire. However that may be, he left a useful and unexpected legacy to his son, provided, indeed, the sinews for the making of a powerful Prussian kingdom.

March the 31st, 1740, this eccentric miser died, to be succeeded by his son, Frederick II, “the Great,” then twenty-eight years old. Here was a surprise indeed. Of these German kings and princes in their small dominions it has been written: “And these magnates all aped Louis XIV as their model. They built huge palaces, as like Versailles as their means would permit, and generally beyond those limits, with fountains and avenues and dismally wide paths. Even in our own day a German monarch has left, fortunately unfinished, an accurate Versailles on a damp island in a Bavarian lake. In those grandiose structures they cherished a blighting etiquette, and led lives as dull as those of the aged and torpid carp in their own stew-ponds. Then, at the proper season, they would break away into the forest and kill game. Moreover, still in imitation of their model, they held, as a necessary feature in the dreary drama of their existence, ponderous dalliances with unattractive mistresses, in whom they fondly tried to discern the charms of a Montespan or a La Vallière. This monotonous programme, sometimes varied by a violent contest whether they should occupy a seat with or without a back, or with or without arms, represented the even tenor of their lives.”

This good stock was evidently lying fallow, and humanity is neither dignified nor pleasant in the part of fertilizer. Frederick the Great, it should be remembered, was a Prussian and for Prussia only. He cared no more about a united Germany than we care for a united America to include Canada, Mexico, and the Argentine. He cared no more for Bavarians and Saxons than for Swedes and Frenchmen, and, as we know, he was utterly contemptuous of German literature or the German language. He redeemed the shallowness and the torpidity of those other mediocre rulers by resisting, and resisting successfully, for what must have been to him seven very long years, the whole force of Austria and some of the lesser German powers, with the armies of Russia and France back of them.

He had a turbulent home life; his father on one occasion even attempted to hang him with his own hands with the cords of the window curtains, and when he fled from home he captured him and proposed to put him to death as a deserter, and only the intervention of the Kings of Poland and Sweden and the Emperor of Germany prevented it. His accomplice, however, was summarily and mercilessly put to death before his eyes. There is no illustration in all history, of such a successful outcome of the rod theory in education, as this of Frederick the Great. The father put into practice what Wesley preached: “Break their wills betimes, whatever it costs; break the will if you would not damn the child. Let a child from a year old be taught to fear the rod and to cry softly.”

The meanness and cruelty, the parsimony and the eccentricities, of the father left the son an army of eighty thousand troops, troops as superior to other troops in Europe as are the Japanese infantry to-day, to the Manchu guards that pick the weeds in the court-yards of the palace at Mukden; and he left him, too, a kingdom with no debts and an overflowing treasury. It is seldom that such insane vanities leave such a fair estate and an heir with such unique abilities for its skilful exploitation. Of Frederick’s wars against Austria, against France, Russia, Saxony, Sweden, and Poland; of his victories at Prague, Leuthen, Rossbach, and Zorndorf; of his addition of Siberia and Polish Prussia to his kingdom; of his comical literary love affair with Voltaire; of his brutal comments upon the reigning ladies of Russia and France, which brought upon him their bitter hatred; of his restoration and improvement of his country; of his strict personal economy and loyalty to his own people, scores of volumes have been written. The hero-worshipper, Carlyle, and the Jove of reviewers, Macaulay, have described him, and many minor scribes besides.

It is said of his victory of Rossbach, in 1757, that then and there began the recreation of Germany, the revival of her political and intellectual life, and union under Prussia and Prussian kings. Frederick the Great deserves this particular encomium; for as Luther freed Germany, and all Christendom indeed, from the tyranny of tradition, as Lessing freed us from the tyranny of the letter, from the second-hand and half-baked Hellenism of a Racine and a Corneille, so Frederick the Great freed his countrymen at last from the puerile slavery to French fashions and traditions, which had made them self- conscious at home and ridiculous abroad. He first made a Prussian proud to be a Prussian.

This last quarter of the eighteenth century in Germany saw the death of Lessing in 1781, the publication of Kant’s “Kritik der Reinen Vernunft” in the same year, and the death of the great Frederick in 1786. These names mark the physical and intellectual coming of age of Germany. Lessing died misunderstood and feared by the card-board literary leaders of his day, men who still wrote and thought with the geometrical instruments handed them from France; Kant attempted to push philosophical inquiry beyond the bounds of human experience, and Frederick left Prussia at last not ashamed to be Prussia. Napoleon was eighteen years old when Frederick died, and he, next to Bismarck, did more to bring about German unity than any other single force. Unsuccessful Charlemagne though he was, he without knowing it blazed the political path which led to the crowning of a German emperor in the palace at Versailles, less than a hundred years after the death of Frederick the Great. In 1797 at Montebello, Napoleon said: “If the Germanic System did not exist, it would be necessary to create it expressly for the convenience of France.”

II FREDERICK THE GREAT TO BISMARCK

Frederick the Great died in 1786, leaving Prussia the most formidable military power on the Continent. In financial, law, and educational matters he had made his influence felt for good. He distributed work-horses and seed to his impoverished nobles; he encouraged silk, cotton, and porcelain industries; he built the Finow, the Planesche, and Bromberger Canals; he placed a tariff on meat, except pork, the habitual food of the poor, and spirits and tobacco and coffee were added to the salt monopoly; he codified the laws, which we shall mention later; he aided the common schools, and in his day were built the opera-house, library, and university in Berlin, and the new palace of Sans Souci at Potsdam.

Almost exactly one hundred years after the death of Frederick the Great, there ended practically, at the death of the Emperor William I, in 1888, the political career of the man, who with his personally manufactured cement of blood and iron, bound Germany together into a nation. The middle of the seventeenth, the middle of the eighteenth, and the middle of the nineteenth centuries, with the Great Elector, Frederick the Great, and Bismarck as the central figures, mark the features of the historical landscape of Germany as with mile-stones.

How difficult was the task to bring at last an emperor of all Germany to his crowning at Versailles, January 18, 1871, and how mighty the artificer who accomplished the work, may be learned from a glance at the political, geographical, and patriotic incoherence of the land that is now the German Empire.

Germany had no definite national policy from the death of Frederick the Great till the reign of Bismarck began in 1862. Hazy discussions of a confederation of princes, of a Prussian empire, of lines of demarcation, of acquisitions of German territory, were the phantoms of a policy, and even these were due to the pressure of Prussia.

The general political torpidity is surprisingly displayed, when one remembers that Goethe (1749-1832), who lived through the French Revolution, who was thirty-seven years old when Frederick the Great died, and who lived through the whole flaming life of Napoleon, was scarcely more stirred by the political features of the time than though he had lived in Seringapatam. He was a superlatively great man, but he was as parochial in his politics as he was amateurish in his science, as he was a mixture of the coxcomb and the boor, in his love affairs. Lessing, who died in 1781, Klopstock, who died in 1803, Schiller, who died in 1805, Kant, who died in 1804, Hegel, who died in 1831, Fichte, who died in 1814, Wolf, who died in 1824, “Jean Paul” Friedrich Richter, who died in 1825, Voss, who died in 1826, Schelling, who died in 1854, the two Schlegels, August Wilhelm and Frederick, who died in 1845 and in 1829, Jacob Grimm, who died in 1863, Herder, Wieland, Kotzebue, what a list of names! What a blossoming of literary activity! But no one of them, these the leaders of thought in Germany, at the time when the world was approaching the birthday of democracy through pain and blood, no one of these was especially interested in politics.

There was theoretical writing about freedom. Heine mocked at his countrymen and at the world in general, and deified Napoleon, from his French mattress, on which he died, in 1856, only fifty-seven years old. Fichte ended a course of lectures on Duty, with the words: “This course of lectures is suspended till the end of the campaign. We shall resume if our country become free, or we shall have died to regain our liberty.” But Fichte neither resumed nor died! Herder criticised his countrymen for their slavish following of French forms and models in their literature, as in their art and social life. And well he might thus criticise, when one remembers how cramped was the literary vision even of such men as Voltaire and Heine. We have already mentioned some of Voltaire’s literary judgments in the preceding chapter, and Heine ventured to compare Racine to Euripides! No wonder that Germany needed schooling in taste, if such were the opinions of her advisers. Such literary canons as these could only be accepted by minds long inured to provincial, literary, and social slavery.

Just as every little princeling of those days in Germany took Louis XIV for his model, so every literary fledgling looked upon Voltaire as a god, and modelled his style upon the stiff and pompous verses of the French literary men of that time.

Not even to-day has Germany escaped from this bondage. In Baden three words out of ten that you hear are French, and the German wherever he lives in Germany still invites you to Mittagessen at eight P. M. because he has no word in his own language for diner, and must still say anständiger or gebildeter Mensch for gentleman. To make the German even a German in speech and ideals and in independence has been a colossal task. One wonders, as one pokes about in odd corners of Germany even now, whether Herder’s caustic contempt, and Bismarck’s cavalry boots, have made every German proud to be a German, as now he surely ought to be. The tribal feeling still exists there.

Fichte’s lectures on Nationality were suppressed and Fichte himself looked upon askance. The Schlegels spent a lifetime in giving Germany a translation of Shakespeare. Hegel wrote the last words of his philosophy to the sound of the guns at the battle of Jena. Goethe writes a paragraph about his meeting with Napoleon. Metternich, born three years before the American Revolution, and who died a year before the battle of Bull Run, declared: “The cause of all the trouble is the attempt of a small faction to introduce the sovereignty of the people under the guise of a representative system.”

If this was the attitude of the intellectual nobility of the time, what are we to suppose that Messrs. Muller and Schultze and Fischer and Kruger, the small shop-keepers and others of their ilk, and their friends thought? Even forty years later Friedrich Hebbel, in 1844, paid a visit to the Industrial Exposition in Paris. He writes in his diary: “Alle diese Dinge sind mir nicht allein gleichgültig; sic sind mir widerwärtig.” Germany had not awakened even then to any wide popular interest in the world that was doing things. As Voltaire phrased it, France ruled the land, England the sea, and Germany the clouds, even as late as the middle of the nineteenth century. This is the more worth noting, as giving a peg upon which to hang Germany’s astounding progress since that time. Even as late as Bismarck’s day he complained of the German: “It is as a Prussian, a Hanoverian, a Würtemberger, a Bavarian, or a Hessian, rather than as a German, that he is disposed to give unequivocal proof of patriotism.” The present ambitious German Emperor said, in 1899, at Hamburg: “The sluggishness shown by the German people in interesting themselves in the great questions moving the world, and in arriving at a political understanding of those questions, has caused me deep anxiety.” What kind of material had the nation-makers to work with! What a long, disappointing task it must have been to light these people into a blaze of patriotism! In those days America, though the population of the American colonies was only eleven hundred and sixty thousand in 1750, talked, wrote, and fought politics. The outstanding personalities of the time were patriots, soldiers, politicians, not a dreamer among them.

England was so nonchalantly free already, that the betting-book at White’s Club records that, “Lord Glengall bets Lord Yarmouth one hundred guineas to five that Buonaparte returns to Paris before Beau Brummel returns to London!” Burke and Pitt, and Fox and North, and Canning might look after politics; Hargreaves and Crompton would take care to keep English industries to the fore, and Watt, and the great canal-builder Brindley, would solve the problem of distributing coal; their lordships cracked their plovers’ eggs, unable to pronounce even the name of a single German town or philosopher, and showed their impartial interest, much as now they do, in contemporary history, by backing their opinions with guineas, with the odds on Caesar against the “Beau.”

Weimar was a sunny little corner where poetry and philosophy and literature were hatched, well out of reach of the political storms of the time. The Grand Duke of Sachsen-Weimar-Eisenach with his tiny court, his Falstaffian army, his mint and his customs-houses, with his well-conducted theatre and his suite of littérateurs, was one of three hundred rulers in the Germany of that time.

The Holy Roman Empire, consisting, in Napoleon’s time, of Austria, Prussia, and a mass of minor states, these last grouped together under the name of the Confederation of the Rhine, and wholly under French influence, lasted one thousand eight hundred and fifty-eight years, or from Caesar’s victory of Pharsalia down to August the 1st, 1806, when Napoleon announced to the Diet that he no longer recognized it.

This institution had no political power, was merely a theoretical political ring for the theoretical political conflicts of German agitators and dreamers, and was composed of the representatives of this tangle of powerless, but vain and self-conscious little states. This Holy Roman Empire, with an Austrian at its head, and aided by France, strove to prevent the development of a strong German state under the leadership of Prussia. After Napoleon’s day it became a struggle between Prussia and Austria. Austria had only eight out of thirty-six million German population, while Prussia was practically entirely German, and Prussia used her army, politics, and commerce to gain control in Germany. Even to-day Austria-Hungary contains the most varied conglomeration of races of any nation in the world. Austria has 26,000,000 inhabitants, of whom 9,000,000 are Germans, 1,000,000 Italians and Rumanians, 6,000,000 Bohemians and Slovacs, 8,000,000 Poles and Ruthenians, 2,000,000 Slovenes and Croatians. Of the 19,000,000 of Hungary there are 9,000,000 Magyars, 2,000,000 Germans, 2,500,000 Slovacs and Ruthenians, 3,000,000 Rumanians, and nearly 3,000,000 Southern Slays.

Weimar was one of the three hundred capitals of this limp empire, with tariffs, stamps, coins, uniforms, customs, gossip, interests, and a sovereign of its own. When Bismarck undertook the unifying of the customs tariffs of Germany, there were even then fifteen hundred different tariffs in existence!

Weimar had its salon, its notables: Goethe, Schiller, Wieland, Frau von Stein, Dr. Zimmermann as a valued correspondent; its Grand Duke Karl August and his consort; Herder, who jealous of the renown of Goethe, and piqued at the insufficient consideration he received, soon departed, to return only when the Grand Duchess took him under her wing and thus satisfied his morbid pride; its love affair, for did not the beautiful Frau von Werthern leave her husband, carry out a mock funeral, and, heralded as dead, elope to Africa with Herr von Einsiedel? But Weimar was as far away from what we now agree to look upon as the great events of the day, as were Lords Glengall and Yarmouth at White’s, in Saint James’s.

It requires imagination to put Goethe and Schiller and Wieland in the bow window at White’s, and to place Lords Glengall and Yarmouth in Frau von Stein’s drawing-room in Weimar; but the discerning eye which can see this picture, knows at a glance why England misunderstands Germany and Germany misunderstands England. For White’s is White’s and Weimar is Weimar, and one is British and one is German as much now as then! In the one the winner of the Derby is of more importance than any philosopher; in the other, philosophers, poets, professors, and playwrights are almost as well known, as the pedigrees of the yearlings to be sold at Newmarket, are known at White’s. They still have plover’s eggs early in the season at White’s, and they still recognize the subtle distinction there between “port wine” and “port”; while in Weimar nobody, unless it be the duke, even boils his sauerkraut in white wine!

One could easily write a chapter on Weimar and its self-satisfied social and literary activities. There were three hundred or more capitals of like complexion and isolation: some larger, some smaller, none perhaps with such a splendid literary setting, but all indifferent with the indifference of distant relatives who seldom see one another, when the French Revolution exploded its bomb at the gates of the world’s habits of thought.

No intelligent man ever objected to the French Revolution because it stood for human rights, but because it led straight to human wrongs. The dream was angelic, but the nightmare in which it ended was devilish. The French Revolution was the most colossal disappointment that humanity has ever had to bear.

More than the demagogue gives us credit for, are the great majority of us eager to help our neighbors. The trouble is that the demagogue thinks this, the most difficult of all things, an easy task. God and Nature are harsh when they are training men, and we, alas, are soft, hence most of our failures. Correction must be given with a rod, not with a sop. There lies all the trouble.

The political and philanthropic wise men were setting out for the manger and the babe, their eyes on the star, laden with gifts, when they were met by a whiff of grape-shot from the guns commanded by a young Corsican genius. The French Revolution found us all sympathetic, but making men of equal height by lopping off their heads; making them free by giving no one a chance to be free; making them fraternal by insisting that all should be addressed by the same title of, “citizen,” was soon seen to be the method of a political nursery.

It was no fault of the French Revolution that it was no revolution at all, in any political sense. Men maddened by oppression hit, kick, bite, and burn. They are satisfied to shake the burden of the moment off their backs, even though the burden they take on be of much the same character. “It is perfectly possible, to revive even in our own day the fiscal tyranny which once left even European populations in doubt whether it was worth while preserving life by thrift and toil. You have only to tempt a portion of the population into temporary idleness, by promising them a share in a fictitious hoard lying in an imaginary strong-box which is supposed to contain all human wealth. You have only to take the heart out of those who would willingly labor and save, by taxing them ad misericordiam for the most laudable philanthropic objects. For it makes not the smallest difference to the motives of the thrifty and industrious part of mankind whether their fiscal oppressor be an Eastern despot, or a feudal baron, or a democratic legislature, and whether they are taxed for the benefit of a corporation called Society or for the advantage of an individual styled King or Lord,” writes Sir Henry Maine. In short it matters not in the least what you baptize oppression, so long as it is oppression, or whether you call your tyrant “Jim” or “My Lord,” so long as he is a tyrant. Many people are slowly awakening to the fact in England and in America, that plain citizen “Jim” can be a most merciless tyrant in spite of his unpretentious name and title. No royal tyrant ever dared to attempt to gain his ends by dynamiting innocent people, as did the trades-unionists at Los Angeles, or to starve a whole population as did the trades-unionists in London. We have not escaped tyranny by changing its name. The idea of the Contrat Social and of all its dilutions since, has been that individuals go to make up society, and that society under the name of the state must take charge of those individuals. The French Revolution was a failure because it fell back upon that tiresome and futile philosophy of government which had been that of Louis XIV. Louis XIV took care of the individual units of the state by exploiting them. He was a sound enough Socialist in theory. France gained nothing of much value along the lines of political philosophy.

Whether it is Louis XIV who says “l’état c’est moi” or the citizens banded together in a state, who claim that the functions of the state are to meddle with the business of every man, matters little. It is the same socialistic philosophy at bottom, and it has produced to-day a France of thirty-eight millions of people pledged to sterility, one million of whom are state officials superintending the affairs of the others at a cost, in salaries alone, of upward of five hundred million dollars a year.

In no political or philosophical sense was the French Revolution a revolution at all. It was a change of administration and leaders, but not a change of political theory. The French Revolution put the state in impartial supremacy over all classes by destroying exemptions claimed by the nobility and the clergy, and thus extended the power of the state. The English Revolution without bloodshed reduced the power of the state, not for the advantage of any class, but for individual liberty and local self-government. We Americans are the political heirs of the latter, not of the former, revolution.

Germany was stirred slightly to hope for freedom, but stirred mightily to protest against anarchy later. These were the two influences from the French Revolution that affected Germany, and they were so contradictory that Germany herself was for nearly a hundred years in a mixed mood. One influence enlivened the theoretical democrat, and the other sent the armies of all Europe post-haste to save what was left of orderly government in France.

But Prussia was not what she had been under Frederick the Great. Frederick was more Louis XIV than Louis XIV himself. The economic and political errors of the French Revolution found their best practical exponent in Frederick the Great. In the introduction to his code of laws we have already mentioned are the words: “The head of the state, to whom is intrusted the duty of securing public welfare, which is the whole aim of society, is authorized to direct and control all the actions of individuals toward this end.” Further on the same code reads: “It is incumbent upon the state to see to the feeding, employment, and payment of all those who cannot support themselves, and who have no claim to the help of the lord of the manor, or to the help of the commune: it is necessary to provide such persons with work which is suitable to their strength and their capacity.”

When Frederick died he left Prussia in the grip of this enervating pontifical socialism, which always everywhere ends by palsying the individual, and through the individual the state, with the blight of demagogical and theoretical legislation. The fine army grew pallid and without spirit, the citizens lost their individual pride, the nation as a whole lost its vigor, and when Napoleon marched into Berlin, he remarked that the country hardly seemed worth conquering.

The century from the death of Frederick the Great, in 1786, to the death of William the First, in 1888, includes, in a convenient period to remember: the downfall of Frederick’s patriotic edifice; the apathy and impotency that followed upon the breaking up of the bureaucracy he had welded into efficiency; the shuffling of the German states by Napoleon as though they were the pack of cards in a great political game; a revival of patriotism in Prussia after floggings and insults that were past bearing; the jealousies and enmities of the various states, the betrayal of one by the other, and finally the struggle between Austria and Prussia to decide upon a leader for all Germany; and at last the war against France, 1870-71, which was to make it clear to the world that Germany had been Prussianized into an empire.

Frederick William II, the nephew of Frederick the Great, who succeeded him, was King of Prussia from 1786 to 1797. Frederick William III, his son, and the husband of the beautiful and patriotic Queen Louisa, was King of Prussia from 1797 to 1840. Frederick William IV, a loquacious, indiscreet, loose-lipped sovereign, of moist intellect and mythical delusions, was King of Prussia from 1840 to 1857, when his mental condition made his retirement necessary, and he was succeeded by his brother, Frederick William Ludwig, first as regent, then as king in 1861, known to us as that admirable King and Emperor, William I, who died in 1888.

Perhaps the most remarkable characteristic of these sovereigns, to those of us who look upon Germany to-day as autocratically governed in fact and by tradition, is their willing surrender to the people, on every occasion when the demand has been, even as little insistent as the German demand has been. In the case of Frederick William IV, his claim, at least in words, upon his divine rights as a sovereign was the mark of a wavering confidence in himself. He was not satisfied with a rational sanction for his authority, but was forever assuring his subjects that God had pronounced for him; much as men of low intelligence attempt to add vigor to their statements by an oath. “I hold my crown,” he said, “by the favor of God, and I am responsible to Him for every hour of my government.” Much under the influence of the two scholars Niebuhr and Ranke, he hated the ideas of the French Revolution, and dreamed of an ideal Christian state like that of the Middle Ages. He was caricatured by the journals of the day, and laughed at by the wits, including Heine, and pictured as a king with “Order” on one hand, “Counter-order” on the other, and “Disorder” on his forehead.

Though Frederick William II marched into France in 1792, to support the French monarchy, neither his army nor his people were prepared or fit for this enterprise, and he soon retired. In 1793, Prussia joined Russia in a second partition of Poland, but in 1795, angry with what was considered the double dealing of Austria and Russia, Prussia concluded a peace with France, the treaty of Basle was signed in 1795, and for ten years Prussia practically took no part in the Napoleonic wars.

Napoleon took over the lands on the left bank of the Rhine, took away the freedom of forty-eight towns, leaving only Hamburg, Bremen, Frankfort, Augsburg, and Nuremberg, and in 1803 he took Hanover. Later, in 1805, Bavaria, Würtemberg, and Baden aided Napoleon to fight the alliance against him of Austria, England, Russia, and Sweden. In that same year the Electors of Würtemberg and Bavaria were made kings by Napoleon. In 1806 Bavaria, Baden, Würtemberg, and Hessen seceded from the German Empire, formed themselves into the Confederation of the Rhine, and acknowledged Napoleon as their protector. In 1806 Francis II, Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire, resigned, and there was neither an empire nor an emperor of Germany, nor was there a Germany of united interests.

In 1806 Frederick William III, driven by the grossest insults to his country and to his wife, finally declared war against France; there followed the battle of Jena, in which the Germans were routed, and in that same year Napoleon marched into Berlin unopposed. In 1807 the Russian Emperor was persuaded to make peace, and Prussia without her ally was helpless. The Peace of Tilsit, in July, 1807, deprived Prussia of the whole of the territory between the Elbe and the Rhine, and this with Brunswick, Hessen-Cassel, and part of Hanover was dubbed the Kingdom of Westphalia, and Napoleon’s youngest brother Jerome was made king. The Polish territory of Prussia was given to the Elector of Saxony, who was also rewarded for having deserted Prussia after the battle of Jena by being made a king. Prussia was further required to reduce her army to forty-two thousand men.

It is neither a pretty nor an inspiriting story, this of the mangling of Germany by Napoleon; of the German princes bribed by kingly crowns from the hands of an ancestorless Corsican; but it all goes to show how far from any sense of common aims and duties, how far from the united Vaterland of to-day, was the Germany of a hundred years ago. It adds, too, immeasurably to the laurels of the man who produced the present German Empire out of his own pocket, and stood as chief sponsor at its christening at Versailles in 1871.

This Prussia that sent twenty thousand troops to aid Napoleon against Russia, and which during the retreat from Moscow went over bodily to the enemy; this Prussia whose vacillating king simpered with delight at a kind word from Napoleon, and shivered with dismay at a harsh one; this army with its officers as haughty as they were incapable, and its men only prevented from wholesale desertion by severe punishment, an army rotten at the core, with a coat of varnish over its worm-eaten fabric; this Prussia humiliated and disgraced after the battle of Jena, in 1806, in seven years’ time came into its own again. Vom Stein, Scharnhorst, the son of a Hanoverian peasant, and Hardenberg put new life into the state. At Waterloo the pummelled squares of red-coats were relieved by these Prussians, and Blücher, or “Old Marschall Vorwärts” as he was called, redeemed his countrymen’s years of effeminate lassitude and vacillation.

“Such was Vorwärts, such a fighter,
Such a lunging, plunging smiter,
Always stanch and always straight,
Strong as death for love or hate,
Always first in foulest weather,
Neck or nothing, hell for leather,
Through or over, sink or swim,
Such was Vorwärts-here’s to him!”

Napoleon goes to Saint Helena and dies in 1821. What he did for Germany was to prove to her how impossible was a cluster of jealous, malicious provincial little state governments in the heart of Europe, protecting themselves from falling apart by the ancient legislative scaffolding of the Holy Roman Empire. He squeezed three hundred states into thirty-eight, and the very year of Waterloo, on April the 1st, a German Napoleon was born who was to further squeeze these states into what is known to-day as the German Empire.

The Congress of Vienna was a meeting of the European powers to redistribute the possessions, that Napoleon had scattered as bribes and rewards among his friends, relatives, and enemies, so far as possible, among their rightful owners.

From the island of Elba, off the coast of Tuscany, Napoleon looked on while the allies quarrelled at this Congress of Vienna. Prussia claimed the right to annex Saxony; Russia demanded Poland, and against them were leagued England, Austria, and France, France represented by the Mephistophelian Talleyrand, who strove merely to stir the discord into another war. In the midst of their deliberations word came that the wolf was in the fold again. Napoleon was riding to Paris, through hysterical crowds of French men and women, eager for another throw against the world, if their Little Corporal were there to shake the dice for them. He had another throw and lost. The French Revolution in 1789, followed by the insurrection of all Europe against that strange gypsy child of the Revolution, Napoleon, from 1807-1815, ended at last at Waterloo. This lover, who won whole nations as other men win a maid or two; this ruler, who had popes for handmaidens and gave kingdoms as tips, who dictated to kings preferably from the palaces of their own capitals; this fortunate demon of a man, who had escaped even Mlle. Montausier, was safely disposed of at Saint Helena, and the ordinary ways of mortals had their place in the world again.

The Congress of Vienna reassembled, and the readjustment of the map of Europe began over again. Prussia is given back what had been taken away from her. A German confederation was formed in 1815 to resist encroachments, but with no definite political idea, and its diet, to which Prussia, Austria, and the other smaller states sent representatives, became the laughing-stock of Europe. Jealous bickerings and insistence upon silly formalities paralyzed legislation. Lawyers and others who presented their claims before this assembly from 1806-1816 were paid in 1843! The liquidation of the debts of the Thirty Years’ War was made after two hundred years, in 1850! The laws for the military forces were finally agreed upon in 1821, and put in force in 1840!

There were three principal forms of government among these states: first, Absolutist, where the ruler and his officials governed without reference to the people, as in Prussia and Austria; second, those who organized assemblies (Landslände), where no promises were made to the people, but where the nobles and notables were called together for consultation; and third, a sort of constitutional monarchy with a written constitution and elected representatives, but with the ruler none the less supreme. One of the first rulers to grant such a constitution to his people was the Grand Duke who presided over the little court at Weimar.

The mass of the people were wholly indifferent. The intellectuals were divided among themselves. The schools and universities after 1818 form associations and societies, the Burschenschaft, for example, and in a hazy professorial fashion talk and shout of freedom. They were of those passionate lovers of liberty, more intent on the dower than on the bride; willing to talk and sing and to tell the world of their own deserts, but with little iron in their blood.

When a real man wants to be free he fights, he does not talk; he takes what he wants and asks for it afterward; he spends himself first and affords it afterward. These dreamy gentlemen could never make the connection between their assertions and their actions. They were as inconsistent, as a man who sees nothing unreasonable in circulating ascetic opinions and a perambulator at the same time. They were dreary and technical advocates of liberty.

At a great festival at the Wartburg, in 1817, the students got out of hand, burned the works of those conservatives, Haller and Kotzebue, and the Code Napoleon. This youthful folly was purposely exaggerated throughout Germany, and was used by the party of autocracy to frighten the people, and also as a reason for passing even severer laws against the ebullitions of liberty. At a conference at Carlsbad in 1819 the representatives of the states there assembled passed severe laws against the student societies, the press, the universities, and the liberal professors.

From 1815-1830 the opinions of the more enlightened changed. The fear of Napoleon was gradually forgotten, and the hatred of the absolutism of Prussia and Austria grew.

In 1830 constitutions were demanded and were guardedly granted in Brunswick, Saxony, Hanover, and Hesse-Cassel. In 1832 things had gone so far that at a great student festival the black, red, and gold flag of the Burschenschaft was hoisted, toasts were drunk to the sovereignty of the people, to the United States of Germany, and to Europe Republican! This was followed by further prosecutions. Prussia condemned thirty-nine students to death, but confined them in a fortress. The prison-cell of the famous Fritz Reuter may be seen in Berlin to-day. In Hesse, the chief of the liberal party, Jordan, was condemned to six years in prison; in Bavaria a journalist was imprisoned for four years, and other like punishments followed elsewhere. It was in 1857, when Queen Victoria came to the throne, that Hanover was cut off from the succession, as Hanover could not descend to a woman. The Duke of Cumberland became the ruler of Hanover, and England ceased to hold any territory in Europe.

From 1839-1847 there was comparative quiet in the political world. The rulers of the various states succeeded in keeping the liberal professorial rhetoric too damp to be valuable as an explosive.

Interwoven with this party in Germany, demanding for the people something more of representation in the government, was a movement for the binding together of the various states in a closer union. In 1842 when the first stone was laid for the completion of the Cologne Cathedral, at a banquet of the German princes presided over by the King of Prussia, the King of Würtemberg proposed a toast to “Our common country!” That toast probably marks the first tangible proof of the existence of any important feeling upon the subject of German unity.

At a congress of Germanists at Frankfort, in 1846, professors and students, jurists and historians, talked and discussed the questions of a German parliament and of national unity more perhaps than matters of scholarship.

In 1847 Professor Gervinus founded at Heidelberg the Deutsche Zeitung, which was to be liberal, national, and for all Germany.

I should be sorry to give the impression that I have not given proper value to the work of the German professor and student in bringing about a more liberal constitution for the states of Germany. Liebig of Munich, Ranke of Berlin, Sybel of Bonn, Ewald of Göttingen, Mommsen in Berlin, Döllinger in Munich, and such men as Schiemann in Berlin to-day, were and are, not only scholars, but they have been and are political teachers; some of them violently reactionary, if you please, but all of them stirring men to think.

No such feeling existed then, or exists now, in Germany, as animated Oxford some fifty years ago when the greatest Sanscrit scholar then living was rejected by a vote of that body, one voter declaring: “I have always voted against damned intellect, and I trust I always may!” A state of mind that has not altogether disappeared in England even now. Indeed I am not sure, that the most notable feature of political life in England to-day, is not a growing revolt against legislation by tired lawyers, and an increasing demand for common-sense governing again, even if the governing be done by those with small respect for “damned intellect.”

The third French revolution of 1848 set fire to all this, not only in Germany but in Austria, Hungary, Roumania, and elsewhere. We must go rapidly through this period of seething and of political teething. The parliament at Frankfort with nothing but moral authority discussed and declaimed, and finally elected Archduke John of Austria as “administrator” of the empire. There followed discussions as to whether Austria should even become a member of the new confederation. Two parties, the “Little Germanists” and the “Pan Germanists,” those in favor of including, and those opposed to the inclusion of Austria, fought one another, with Prussia leading the one and Austria, with the prestige of having been head of the former Holy Roman Empire, the other.

In 1849 Austria withdrew altogether and the King of Prussia was elected Emperor of Germany, but refused the honor on the ground that he could not accept the title from the people, but only from his equals. There followed riots and uprisings of the people in Prussia, Saxony, Baden, and elsewhere throughout Germany. The Prussian guards were sent to Dresden to quell the rioting there and took the city after two days’ fighting. The parliament itself was dispersed and moved to Stuttgart, but there again they were dispersed, and the end was a flight of the liberals to Switzerland, France, and the United States. We in America profited by the coming of such valuable citizens as Carl Schurz and many others. There were driven from Germany, they and their descendants, many among our most valuable citizens. The descendant of one of the worthiest of them, Admiral Osterhaus, is one of the most respected officers in our navy, and will one day command it, and we could not be in safer hands. In 1849 the German Federal fleet was sold at auction as useless; Austria was again in the ascendant and German subjects in Schleswig were handed over to the Danes.

In 1850 both the King of Prussia and the Emperor of Austria called congresses, but Prussia finally gave up hers, and the ancient confederation as of before 1848 met as a diet at Frankfort and from 1851-1858 Bismarck was the Prussian delegate and Austria presided over the deliberations.

A factor that made for unity among the German states was the Zollverein. From 1818-1853 under the leadership of Prussia the various states were persuaded to join in equalizing their tariffs. Between 1834-5 Prussia, Bavaria, Würtemberg, Saxony, Baden, Hesse-Nassau, Thuringia, and Frankfort agreed upon a common standard for customs duties, and a few years later they were joined by Brunswick, Hanover, and the Mecklenburgs. German industry and commerce had their beginnings in these agreements. The hundreds of different customs duties became so exasperating that even jealous little governments agreed to conform to simpler laws, and probably this commercial necessity did more to bring about the unity of Germany than the King, or politics, or the army.

With the struggles of the various states to obtain constitutions we cannot deal, nor would it add to the understanding of the present political condition of the German Empire.

Prussia, after riots in Berlin, after promises and delays from the vacillating King, who one day orders his own troops out of the capital and his brother, later William I, to England to appease the anger of the mob, and parades the streets with the colors of the citizens in revolt wrapped about him; and the next day, surly, obstinate, but ever orating, holds back from his pledges, finally accepts a constitution which is probably as little democratic as any in the world.

Of the sixty-five million inhabitants of the German Empire, Prussia has over forty millions. The Landtag of Prussia is composed of two chambers, the first called the Herrenhaus, or House of Lords, and the second the Abgeordnetenhaus, or Chamber of Deputies. This upper house is made up of the princes of the royal family who are of age; the descendants of the formerly sovereign families of Hohenzollern- Hechingen and Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen; chiefs of the princely houses recognized by the Congress of Vienna; heads of the territorial nobility formed by the King; representatives of the universities; burgomasters of towns with more than fifty thousand inhabitants, and an unlimited number of persons nominated by the King for life or for a limited period. This upper chamber is a mere drawing-room of the sovereign’s courtiers, though there may be, and as a matter of fact there are at the present time, representatives even of labor in this chamber, but in a minority so complete that their actual influence upon legislation, except in a feeble advisory capacity, amounts to nothing. In this Herrenhaus, or upper chamber, of Prussia there are at this writing among the 327 members 3 bankers, 8 representatives of the industrial and merchant class, and 1 mechanic; 12 in all, or not even four per cent., to represent the industrial, financial, commercial, and working classes. Even in the lower chamber, or Abgeordnetenhaus, there are only 10 merchants, 19 manufacturers, 7 labor representatives, and 1 bank director, or 37 members who represent the commercial, manufacturing, and industrial interests in a total membership of 443.

In the other states of Germany much the same conditions exist. In Bavaria, in the upper house, or Kammer der Reichsräte, there is no representative, and in the lower house of 163 members only 29 representatives of the industrial world.

In Saxony, the most socialistic state in Germany, the upper chamber with 49 members has 5 industrials; the lower chamber with 82 members has 40 representatives of commercial, industrial, and financial affairs.

In Würtemberg, in the upper chamber with 51 members there are 3 industrials; and in the second chamber with 63 members there are 17 industrials.

In Baden, of the 37 members of the upper house there are 6 industrials; of the 73 members of the lower house there are 23 representatives of commerce and industry.

This condition of political inequality is the result of the maintenance of the old political divisions, despite the fact that in the last thirty years the whole complexion of the country has changed radically, due to the rapid increase of the city populations representing the industrial and commercial progress of a nation that is now the rival of both the United States and Great Britain. In more than one instance a town with over 300,000 inhabitants will be represented in the legislature in the same proportion as a country population of 30,000. Stettin, for example, with a population of 245,000, which is a seventh of the total population of Pomerania, has only 6 of the 89 provincial representatives. Further, the three-class system of voting in Prussia and in the German cities, is a unique arrangement for giving men the suffrage without either power or privilege. According to this system every male inhabitant of Prussia aged twenty-five is entitled to vote in the election of members of the lower house. The voters, however, are divided into three classes. This division is made by taking the total amount of the state taxes paid in each electoral district and dividing it into three equal amounts. The first third is paid by the highest tax-payers; the second third by the next highest tax-payers, and the last third by the rest. The first class consists of a comparatively few wealthy people; it may even happen that a single individual pays a third of the taxes in a given district. These three classes then elect the members of an electoral college, who then elect the member of the house. In Prussia it may be said roughly that 260,000 wealthy tax-payers elect one-third; 870,000 tax-payers elect one-third, and the other 6,500,000 voters elect one-third of the members of the electoral college, with the consequence that the 6,500,000 are not represented at all in the lower house of Prussia. In order to make this three-class system of voting quite clear, let us take the case of a city where the same principle may be seen at work on a smaller scale. In 1910, in the city of Berlin, there were:

931 voters of the first class paying 27,914,593 marks of the total tax.

32,131 voters of the second class paying 27,908,776 marks of the total tax.

357,345 voters of the third class paying 16,165,501 marks of the total tax.

Roughly the voters in the first class each paid $7,500; those in the second class $218; those in the third class $11. The 931 voters elected one-third, 32,131 voters elected one-third, and 357,345 elected one-third of the town councillors. In this same year in Berlin there were:

521 persons with incomes between $25,000 and $62,500.

139 persons with incomes between $62,500 and $125,000.

22 persons with incomes between $125,000 and $187,500.

19 persons with incomes between $187,000 and $250,000.

19 persons with incomes of $250,000 or more. Or 720 persons in Berlin in 1912 with incomes of over $25,000 a year, and they are practically the governors of the city.

As a result of these divisions according to taxes paid, of the 144 town councillors elected, only 38 were Social-Democrats, though Berlin is overwhelmingly Social-Democratic, and consequently the affairs of this city of more than 2,000,000 inhabitants are in the hands of 33,062 persons who elect two-thirds of the town councillors.

In the city of Düsseldorf there were, excluding the suburbs, 62,443 voters at the election for town councillors in 1910. The first class was composed of 797 voters paying from 1,940 to 264,252 marks of taxes; 6,645 voters paying from 222 to 1,939 marks; and 55,001 voters paying 221 marks or less. These 7,442 voters of the first and second classes were in complete control of the city government by a clear majority of two-thirds.

It is this three-class system of voting that makes Prussia, and the Prussian cities as well, impregnable against any assault from the democratically inclined. In addition to this system, the old electoral divisions of forty years ago remain unchanged, and consequently the agricultural east of Prussia, including east and west Prussia, Brandenburg, Pomerania, Posen, and Silesia, with their large landholders, return more members to the Prussian lower house than the much greater population of western industrial Prussia, which includes Sachsen, Hanover, Westphalia, Schleswig-Holstein, Hohenzollern, Hessen-Nassau, and the Rhine. Further, the executive government of Prussia is conducted by a ministry of state, the members of which are appointed by the King, and hold office at his pleasure, without control from the Landtag.

How little the people succeeded in extorting from King Frederick William IV in the way of a constitution may be gathered from this glimpse of the present political conditions of Prussia.

The local government of Prussia is practically as centralized in a few hands as the executive government of the state itself. The largest areas are the provinces, whose chiefs or presidents also are appointed by the sovereign, and who represent the central government. There are twelve such provinces in Prussia, ranging in size from the Rhineland and Brandenburg, with 7,120,519 and 4,093,007 inhabitants respectively, to Schleswig-Holstein, with 1,619,673.

Each province is divided into two or more government districts, of which there are thirty-five in all. At the head of each of these districts is the district president, also appointed by the crown.

In addition there is the Kreis, or Circle, of which there are some 490, with populations varying from 20,000 to 801,000. These circles are, for all practical purposes, governed by the Landrath, who is appointed for life by the crown, and who is so fully recognized as the agent of the central government and not as the servant of the locality in which he rules, that on one occasion several Landräthe were summarily dismissed for voting against the government and in conformity to the wishes of the inhabitants of the circle in which they lived! Though the Landrath is nominated by the circle assembly for appointment by the crown, he can be dismissed by his superiors of the central hierarchy. As his promotion, and his career in fact, is dependent upon these superiors, he naturally sides with the central government in all cases of dispute or friction.

Further, and this is important, all officials in Germany are legally privileged persons. All disputes between individuals and public authorities in Germany are decided by tribunals quite distinct from the ordinary courts. These courts are specially constituted, and they aim at protecting the officials from any personal responsibility for acts done by them in their official capacity.

In America, and I presume in Great Britain also, any disputes between public authorities and private individuals are settled in the ordinary courts of justice, under the rules of the ordinary law of the land. This super-common-law position of the Prussian official is a fatal incentive to the aggravating exaggeration of his importance, and to the indifference of his behavior to the private citizen. There may be officials who are uninfluenced by this sheltered position, indeed I know personally many who are, but there is equally no doubt that many succumb to arrogance and lethargy as a consequence.

How thoroughly Prussia is covered by a network of officialdom, is further discovered when it is known, that the entire area of Prussia is some twenty thousand square miles less than that of the State of California. The whole Prussian doctrine of local self-government, too, is entirely different from ours. Their idea is that self-government is the performance by locally elected bodies of the will of the state, not necessarily of the locality which elects them. Local authorities, whether elected or not, are supposed to be primarily the agents of the state, and only secondarily the agents of the particular locality they serve. In Prussia, all provincial and circle assemblies and communal councils, may be dissolved by royal decree, hence even these elected assemblies may only serve their constituencies at the will and pleasure of the central authority.

It would avail little to go into minute details in describing the government of Prussia; this slight sketch of the electoral system, and of the centralization of the government, suffices to show two things that it is particularly my purpose to make clear. One is the preponderating influence of Prussia in the empire, due to the maintenance of power in a single person; and the other is to show how ridiculously futile it is to refer to Prussia as an example of the success of social legislation. The state ownership of railroads, old-age pensions, accident and sickness insurance, and the like are one thing in Prussia which is a close corporation, and quite another in any community or country under democratic government. What takes place in Prussia would certainly not take place in America or in England. To draw inferences from a state governed as is Prussia, for application to such democratic communities as America or England, is as valuable as to argue from the habits of birds, that such and such a treatment would succeed with fish.

It was with this autocratic Prussia at his back, that the greatest man Germany has produced, succeeded in bringing about German unity and the foundation of the German Empire. As the representative of Prussia in the Diet, as her ambassador to Russia, and to France, he gained the insight into the European situation which led him to hold as his political creed, that only by blood and iron, and not by declamations and resolutions, could Germany be united.

“During the time I was in office,” he writes, “I advised three wars, the Danish, the Bohemian, and the French; but every time I have first made clear to myself whether the war, if successful, would bring a prize of victory worth the sacrifices which every war requires, and which now are so much greater than in the last century. ... I have never looked at international quarrels which can only be settled by a national war from the point of view of the Göttingen student code; ... but I have always considered simply their reaction on the claim of the German people, in equality with the other great states and powers of Europe, to lead an autonomous political life, so far as is possible on the basis of our peculiar national capacity.” In 1863 he writes to von der Goltz, then German ambassador in Paris: “The question is whether we are a great power or a state in the German federation, and whether we are conformably to the former quality to be governed by a monarch, or, as in the latter case would be at any rate admissible, by professors, district judges, and the gossips of the small towns. The pursuit of the phantom of popularity in Germany which we have been carrying on for the last forty years has cost us our position in Germany and in Europe; and we shall not win this back again by allowing ourselves to be carried away by the stream in the persuasion that we are directing its course, but only by standing firmly on our legs and being, first of all, a great power and a German federal state afterward.”

After Napoleon and the interminable elocutionary squabbles of the German states, first, for constitutional rights, and, second, for some basis of unity among themselves, which were the two main streams of political activity, there were three main steps in the formation of the now existing empire: first, in 1866, the North German Confederation under the presidency of Prussia and excluding Austria; second, the conclusion of treaties, 1866-1867, between the North German Confederation and the south German states; third, the formal union of the north and south German states as an empire in 1871.

Although the Holy Roman Empire ceased to exist legally in 1806, it is to be remembered that as a fiction weighing still upon the imagination of German politicians, it did not wholly disappear until the war between Prussia and Austria, for then Prussia fought not only Austria but Bavaria, Würtemberg, Saxony, Hanover, Nassau, Baden, and the two Hesse states, and at Sadowa in Bohemia the war was settled by the defeat of the Austrians before they could be joined by these allies, who were disposed of in detail. Frankfort was so harshly treated that the mayor hanged himself, and the Prussianizing of Hanover has never been entirely forgiven, and the claimants to the throne in exile are still the centre of a political party antagonistic to Prussia. The taking over of north Schleswig, of Hanover, Hesse-Cassel, and Nassau by Prussia after the Austrian war was according to the rough arbitrament of conquest. “Our right,” replied Bismarck to the just criticism of this spoliation, “is the right of the German nation to exist, to breathe, to be united; it is the right and the duty of Prussia to give the German nation the foundation necessary for its existence.” In taking Alsace-Lorraine from France, Bismarck insisted that this was a necessary barrier against France and that Germany’s possession of Metz and Strassburg were necessities of the situation also.

The history of German unity is the biography of Bismarck. Otto Eduard Leopold von Bismarck was born in Schönhausen, in that Mark of Brandenburg which was the cradle of the Prussian monarchy, on the first of April, 1815. His grandfather fought at Rossbach under the great Frederick. He was confirmed in Berlin in 1831 by the famous pastor and theologian, Schleiermacher, and maintained all his life that without his belief in God he would have found no reason for his patriotism or for any serious work in life.

He matriculated as a student of law and science at Göttingen in May, 1832, and later at Berlin in 1834. He was a tall, large-limbed, blue-eyed young giant, the boldest rider, the best swordsman, and the heartiest drinker of his day. He is still looked upon in Germany as the typical hero of corps student life, and his pipe, or his Schläger, or his cap, or his Kneipe jacket is preserved as the relic of a saint. His was not the tepid virtue born of lack of vitality. One has but to remember Augustine and Origen and Ignatius Loyola, to recall the fact that the preachers of salvation, the best of them, have generally had themselves to tame before they mastered the world.

This youth Bismarck must have had some vigorous battles with Bismarck before he married Johanna Friederika Charlotte Dorothea Eleanore von Puttkamer, July 28, 1847, much against the wishes of her parents, and settled down to his life-work. As was said of John Pym, “he thought it part of a man’s religion to see that his country was well governed,” and his country became his passion. Like most men of intense feeling, he loved few people and loyally hated many. More men feared and envied him than liked him. His wife, his sister, his king, a student friend, Keyserling, and the American, Motley, shared with his country his affection. Germany might well take it to heart that it was Motley the American who was of all men dearest to her giant creator. The same type of American would serve her better to-day than any other, did she only know it! In 1849 he was elected to the Prussian Chamber. In 1852 a whiff of the old dare-devil got loose, and he fought a duel with Freiherr von Vincke.

In 1852 he is sent on his first responsible mission to Vienna, and found there the traditions of the Metternich diplomacy still ruling. What Napoleon had said of Metternich he no doubt remembered: “Il ment trop. Il faut mentir quelquefois, mais mentir tout le temps c’est trop!” for he adopted quite the opposite policy in his own diplomatic dealings.

In 1855 he became a member of the upper house of Prussia, and in 1859 is sent as minister to St. Petersburg. In May, 1862, he is sent as minister to Paris, and learns to know, and not greatly to admire, the third Napoleon and his court.

On the 23d of September, 1862, he is appointed Staats-minister, and a week later thunders out his famous blood-and-iron speech. On October the 8th, 1862, he is definitely named Minister President and Minister for Foreign Affairs.

William I had succeeded his brother as king. He was a soldier and a believer in the army, and wished to spend more on it, and to lengthen the time of service with the colors to three years. The legislature opposed these measures. A minister was needed who could bully the legislature, and Bismarck was chosen for the task. He spent the necessary money despite the legislative opposition, pleading that a legislature that refused to vote necessary supplies had ipso facto laid down its proper functions, and the king must take over the responsibilities of government that they declined to exercise. The cavalry boots were beginning to trample their way to Paris, and to the crowning of an emperor.

In February, 1864, Prussia and Austria together declare war upon Denmark over the Schleswig-Holstein succession. They agree to govern the spoils between them, but fall out over the question of their respective jurisdiction, and the Prussian army being ready, and the Moltke plan of campaign worked out, war is declared, and in seven weeks the Treaty of Prague is signed, in 1866, by which Austria gives up all her rights in Schleswig-Holstein, and abandons her claim to take part in the reorganization of Germany. The North German Confederation is formed to include all lands north of the Main; Schleswig-Holstein, Hanover, the Hesse states, Nassau, and Frankfurt-am-Main become part of Prussia; and the south German states agree to remain neutral, but allies of Prussia in war.

On the 11th of March, 1867, a month after the formation of the Confederation of the North German States, Bismarck proclaims with pride in the new Reichstag: “Setzen win Deutschland, so zu sagen, in den Sattel! Reiten wird es schon können!”

October 13th, 1868, Leopold von Sigmaringen, a German prince of the House of Hohenzollern, is named for the first time as a candidate for the Spanish throne. Nobody in Germany, or anywhere else, was much more interested in this candidature, than we are now interested in the woman’s suffrage or the prohibition candidate at home. But France had looked on with jealous eyes at the vigorous growth and martial successes of Prussia. It was thought well to attack her and humiliate her before she became stronger. All France was convinced, too, that the southern German states would revert to their old love in case of actual war, and side with the nephew of their former friend, the great Napoleon. The French ambassador is instructed to force the pace. Not only must the Prussian King disavow all intention to support the candidacy of the German prince, but he must be asked to humiliate himself by binding himself never in the future to push such claims.

William I is at Ems, and Benedetti, the French ambassador, reluctantly presses the insulting demand of his country upon the royal gentleman as he is walking. The King declines to see Benedetti again, and telegraphs to Bismarck the gist of the interview. Lord Acton writes: “He [Bismarck] drew his long pencil and altered the text, showing only that Benedetti had presented an offensive demand, and that the King had refused to see him. That there might be no mistake he made this official by sending it to all the embassies and legations. Moltke exclaimed, ‘You have converted surrender into defiance.’ ” The altered telegram was also sent to the Norddeutscher Allgemeine Zeitung and to officials. It is not perhaps generally known that General Lebrun went to Vienna in June, 1870, to discuss an alliance with Austria for an attack on the North German Confederation in the following spring. Bismarck knew this. This was on the 13th of July, 1870; on the 16th the order was given to mobilize the army, on the 31st followed the proclamation of the King to his people: “Zur Errettung des Vaterlandes.” On August the 2d, King William took command of the German armies, and on September 1st, Napoleon handed over his sword, and on January the 18th, 1871, King William of Prussia was proclaimed German Emperor in the Hall of the Mirrors in the Palace at Versailles.

“It sounds so lovely what our fathers did,
And what we do is, as it was to them,
Toilsome and incomplete.”

It is easy to forget in such a rapid survey of events that Bismarck could have had any serious opposition to face as he tramped through those eight years, from 1862 to 1870, with a kingdom on his back. It is easy to forget that King William himself wished to abdicate in those dark hours, when his people refused him their confidence, and called a halt upon his endeavors to strengthen the absolutely essential instrument for Prussia’s development, the army; it is easy to forget that even the silent and seemingly imperturbable Moltke hesitated and wavered a little at the audacity of his comrade; it is easy to forget the conspiracy of opposition of the three women of the court, the Crown Princess, Frau von Blumenthal, and Frau von Gottberg, all of English birth, and all using needles against this man accustomed to the Schläger and the sword; it is easy to forget that even Queen Victoria’s influence was used against him to prevent the reaping of the justifiable fruits of victory in 1871; it is easy to forget what a bold throw it was to go to war with Austria, and to array Prussia against the very German states she must later bind to herself; it is easy to forget the dour patience of this irascible giant with the petulant and often petty legislature with which he had to deal.

I cannot understand how any German can criticise Bismarck, but there are official prigs who do; little decorated bureaucrats who live their lives out poring over papers, with an eye out for a “von” before their bourgeois names, and as void of audacity as a sheep; men who creep up the stairway to promotion and recognition, clinging with cautious grip to the banisters. One sees them, their coats covered with the ceramic insignia of their placid servitude, decorations tossed to them by the careless hand of a master who is satisfied if they but sign his decrees, with the i’s properly dotted, and the t’s unexceptionably crossed. They are the crumply officials who melted into defencelessness and moral decrepitude after Frederick the Great, and again at the glance of Napoleon, and who owe the little stiffness they have to the fact that Bismarck lived. It is one of the things a full-blooded man is least able to bear in Germany, to hear the querulous questioning of the great deeds of this man, whose boot-legs were stiffer than the backbones of those who decry him.

What a splendid fellow he was!

“Give me the spirit that, on this life’s rough sea,
Loves to have his sails filled with a lusty wind,
Even till his sail-yards tremble and his masts do crack,
And his rapt ship run on her side so low
That she drinks water and her keel ploughs air.
There is no danger to a man that knows
What life and death is - there’s not any law
Exceeds his knowledge; neither is it lawful
That he should stoop to any other law.”

He was no worshipper of that flimsy culture which is, and has been for a hundred years, an obsession of the German. He knew, none knew better indeed, that the choicest knowledge is only mitigated ignorance. He surprised Disraeli with his mastery of English, and Napoleon with his fluency in French, both of which he had learned from his Huguenot professors. The popular man, the popular book, the popular music, picture, or play, were none of them a golden calf to him. He mastered what he needed for his work, and pretended to no enthusiasm for intellectualism as such. He knew that there is no real culture without character, and that the mere aptitude for knowing and doing without character is merely the simian cleverness that often dazzles but never does anything of importance. “Culture!” writes Henry Morley, “the aim of culture is to bring forth in their due season the fruits of the earth.” Any learning, any accomplishments, that do not serve a man to bring forth the fruits of the earth in their due season are merely mental gimcracks, flimsy toys, to admire perhaps, to play with, and to be thrown aside as useless when duty makes its sovereign demands.

Much as Germany has done for the development of the intellectual life of the world, she has suffered not a little from the superficial belief still widely held that instruction, that learning, are culture. Their Great Elector, their Frederick the Great, and their Bismarck, should have taught them the contrary by now.

The newly crowned German Emperor left Versailles on March 7th for Berlin, and on March 21st the first Diet of the new empire was opened, and began the task of adapting the constitution to the altered circumstances of the new empire.

The German Empire now consists of four kingdoms: Prussia, Bavaria, Saxony, and Würtemberg; of six grand duchies: Baden, Hesse-Darmstadt, Saxe-Weimar, Oldenburg, Meeklenburg-Strelitz, and Mecklenburg-Schwerin; of five duchies: Saxe-Meinigen, Saxe-Altenburg Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, Brunswick, and Anhalt; of seven principalities: Schwartzburg-Sondershausen, Schwartzburg-Rudolstadt, Waldeck, Reuss (older line), Reuss (younger line), Lippe, and Schaumburg-Lippe; of three free towns: Hamburg, Bremen, and Lübeck; and of one imperial province: Alsace Lorraine.

The new empire is in a sense a continuation of the North German Confederation. There are 25 states, the largest, Prussia, with a population of over 40,000,000; the smallest, Schaumburg-Lippe, with a population of a little more than 46,000 and an area of 131 square miles.

The central or federal authority controls the army, navy, foreign relations, railways, main roads, canals, post and telegraph, coinage, weights and measures, copyrights, patents, and legislation over nearly the whole field of civil and criminal law, regulation of press and associations, imperial finance and customs tariffs, which are now the same throughout Germany.

Bavaria still manages her own railways, and Saxony and Würtemberg have certain privileges and exemptions. Administration is still almost entirely in the hands of the separate states.

The law is imperial, but the judges are appointed by the states, and are under its authority. The supreme court of appeal (Reichsgericht) sits at Leipsic.

The head of the executive government is the Emperor, no longer elective but hereditary, and attached to the office of the King of Prussia. Outside of Prussia he has little power in civil matters and no veto on legislation. He is commander-in-chief of the army and of the navy; foreign affairs are in his hands, and in the federal council, or Bundesrath, he exercises a mighty influence due to Prussia’s preponderating influence and voting power. There is no cabinet, just as there is no cabinet in Great Britain, that modern institution being merely a legislative fiction down to this day. The chancellor of the empire, who is also prime minister of Prussia, with several secretaries of state, is chief minister for all imperial affairs. The chancellor presides in the Bundesrath, and has the right to speak in the Reichstag, and frequently does speak there. Indeed, all his more important pronouncements are made there. The chancellor is responsible to the Emperor alone, by whom he is nominated, and not to the representatives of the people.

The federal council, or Bundesrath, or upper chamber of the empire, consists of delegates appointed by and representing the rulers of the various states. There are 58 members. Prussia has 17, Bavaria 6, Saxony 4, Würtemberg 4, Baden 3, Hessen 3, Mecklenburg-Schwerin 2, Brunswick 2, and each of the other states 1.

This body meets in Berlin, sits in secret, and the delegates have no discretion, but vote as directed by their state governments. Here it is that Prussia, and through Prussia the Emperor, dominates. This Bundesrath is the most powerful upper chamber in the world. With respect to all laws concerning the army and navy, and taxation for imperial purposes, the vote of Prussia shall decide disputes, if such vote be cast in favor of maintaining existing arrangements. In other words, Prussia is armed in the Bundesrath with a conservative veto! In declaring war and making treaties, the consent of the Bundesrath is required. The following articles also give the Bundesrath a very complete control of the Reichstag. Article 7 reads: “The Bundesrath shall take action upon (1) the measures to be proposed to the Reichstag and the resolutions passed by the same; (2) the general administrative provisions and arrangements necessary for the execution of the imperial laws, so far as no other provision is made by law; (3) the defects which may be discovered in the execution of the imperial laws or of the provisions and arrangements heretofore mentioned.”

The Reichstag, or lower house, is elected by universal suffrage in electoral districts which were originally equal, but as we have noted are far from equal now. This house has three hundred and ninety-seven members, of whom two hundred and thirty-five are from Prussia. It sits for five years, but may be dissolved by the Bundesrath with the consent of the Emperor. All members of the Bundesrath, as well as the chancellor, may speak in the Reichstag. Nor the chancellor, nor any other executive officer, is responsible to the Reichstag, nor can be removed by its vote, and the ministers of the Emperor are seldom or never chosen from this body. This Reichstag is really only nominally a portion of the governing body. It has the right to refuse to pass a bill presented by the government, but if it does so it may be summarily dismissed, as has happened several times, and another election usually provides a more amenable body.

Of the various political parties in the Reichstag we have written elsewhere. It is, perhaps, fair to say that such powerful parties as the Socialists and the Centrum must be reckoned with by the chancellor. He cannot actually trample upon them, nor can he disregard wholly their wishes in framing and in carrying through legislation. It would be going much too far in characterizing the weakness of the Reichstag to leave that impression upon the reader. None the less it remains true that it is the executive who rules and has the whip-hand, and who in a grave crisis can override the representatives of the people assembled in the Reichstag, and on more than one occasion this has been done.

It seems highly unnecessary to announce after this description of the imperial constitution that there is no such thing in Germany as democratic or representative government. But this fact cannot be proclaimed too often since in other countries it is continually assumed that this is the case. All sorts of deductions are made, all sorts of illustrations used, all sorts of legislative and social lessons taught from the example of Germany, without the smallest knowledge apparently on the part of those who make them, that Germany to-day is no more democratic than was Turkey twenty years ago.

What can be done and what is done in Germany has no possible bearing upon what can be done in America or in England. All analogies are false, all illustrations futile, all examples valueless, for the one reason that the empire of Germany is governed by one man, who declaims his independence of the people and admits his responsibility to God alone. This may be either a good or a bad thing. Certainly in many matters of economical and comfortable government for the people- witness more particularly the development and wise control of their municipalities-they are a century ahead of us, but this is not the question under discussion. The point is, that a compact nation under strict centralized control, served by a trained horde of officials with no wish for a change, and backed by a standing army of over seven hundred thousand men, who are not only a defence against the foreigner, but a powerful police against internal revolution, cannot serve as a model in either its successes or failures for a democratic country like ours. Where in Germany legislative schemes succeed easily when this huge bureaucratic machine is behind them, they would fail ignominiously in a country lacking this machinery, and lacking these pitiably tame people accustomed to submission.

In France, for example, that thrifty and individualistic folk made a complete failure of the attempt to foist contributory old-age pensions upon them, and I doubt whether such sumptuary legislation can succeed with us. That, however, is neither here nor there. The gist of the matter is, that because such things succeed in Germany, gives not the slightest reason for supposing that they will succeed with us. If this outline of their history and this sketch of their government have done nothing else, it must have made this clear. It may also help to show how vapid is the talk about what the German people will or will not do; whether they will or will not have war, for example. We shall have war when the German Kaiser touches a button and gives an order, and the German people will have no more to say in the matter than you and I.

III THE INDISCREET

The casual observer of life in England would find himself forced to write of sport, even as in India he would write of caste, as in America he would note the undue emphasis laid upon politics. In Germany, wherever he turns, whether it be to look at the army, to inquire about the navy, to study the constitution, or to disentangle the web of present-day political strife; to read the figures of commercial and industrial progress, or the results of social legislation; to look on at the Germans at play during their yachting week at Kiel, or their rowing contests at Frankfort, he finds himself face to face with the Emperor.

The student visits Berlin, or Potsdam, or Wilhelmshöhe; or with a long stride finds himself on the docks at Hamburg or Bremen, or beside the Kiel Canal, or in Kiel harbor facing a fleet of war-ships; or he lifts his eyes into the air to see a dirigible balloon returning from a voyage of two hundred and fifty miles toward London over the North Sea, and the Emperor is there. Is it the palace hidden in its shrubbery in the country; is it the clean, broad streets and decorations of the capital; is it a discussion of domestic politics, or a question of foreign politics, the Emperor’s hand is there. His opinion, his influence, what he has said or has not said, are inextricably interwoven with the woof and web of German life.

We may like him or dislike him, approve or disapprove, rejoice in autocracy or abominate it, admire the far-reaching discipline, or regret the iron mould in which much of German life is encased, but for the moment all this is beside the mark. Here is a man who in a quarter of a century has so grown into the life of a nation, the most powerful on the continent, and one of the three most powerful in the world, that when you touch it anywhere you touch him, and when you think of it from any angle of thought, or describe it from any point of view, you find yourself including him.

Personally, I should have been glad to leave this chapter unwritten. I have no taste for the discussion and analysis of living persons, even when they are of such historic and social importance, and of such magnitude, that I am thus given the proverbial license of the cat. But to write about Germany without writing about the Emperor is as impossible as to jump away from one’s own shadow. When the sun is behind any phase or department of German life, the shadow cast is that of Germany’s Emperor.

This is not said because it is pleasing to whomsoever it may be, for in Germany, and in much of the world outside Germany, this situation is looked upon as unfavorable, and even deplorable; and certainly no American can look upon it with equanimity, for it is of the essence of his Americanism to distrust it. It is, however, so much a fact that to neglect a discussion of this personality would be to leave even so slight a sketch of Germany as this, hopelessly lop-sided. He so pervades German life that to write of the Germany of the last twenty-five years without attempting to describe William the Second, German Emperor, would be to leave every question, institution, and problem of the country without its master-key.

In other chapters dealing more particularly with the political development of Germany, and with the salient characteristics, mental and moral, of the people, we shall see how it has come about, that one man can thus impregnate a whole nation of sixty-five millions with his own aims and ambitions, to such an extent, that they may be said, so to speak, to live their political, social, martial, religious, and even their industrial, life in him. It is a phenomenon of personality that exists nowhere else in the world to-day, and on so large a scale and among so enlightened a people, perhaps never before in history.

Nothing has made scientific accuracy in dealing with the most interesting and most important factors in the world, so utterly inaccurate and misleading, as those infallibly accurate and impersonal agents, electricity and the sun. If one were to judge a man by his photographs, and the gossip of the press, one would be sure to know nothing more valuable about him than that his mustache is brushed up, and that his brows are permanently lowering. Personality is so evasive that one may count upon it that when a machine says “There it is!” then there it is not! You will have everything that is patent and nothing that is pertinent.

We are forever talking and writing about the smallness of the world, of how much better we know one another, and of how much more we should love one another, now that we flash photographs and messages to and fro, at a speed of leagues a second. Nothing could be more futile and foolish. These things have emphasized our differences, they have done nothing to realize our likeness to one another. We are as far from one another as in the days, late in the tenth century, when they complained in England that men learned fierceness from the Saxon of Germany, effeminacy from the Fleming, and drunkenness from the Dane.

As probably the outstanding figure and best-known, superficially known, man in the world, the German Emperor has escaped the notice of very few people who notice anything. His likeness is everywhere, and gossip about him is on every tongue. He is as familiar to the American as Roosevelt, to the Englishman as Lloyd-George, to the Frenchman as Dreyfus, to the Russian as his Czar, and to the Chinese and Japanese as their most prominent political figure. And yet I should say that he is comparatively little known, either externally or internally, as he is.

It is perhaps the fate of those of most influence to be misunderstood. Of this, I fancy, the Emperor does not complain. Indeed, those feeble folk who complain of being misunderstood, ought to console themselves with the thought that practically all our imperishable monuments, are erected to the glory of those whom we condemned and criticised; starved and stoned; burned and crucified, when we had them with us.

William II, German Emperor and King of Prussia, was born January 27, 1859, and became German Emperor June 15, 1888. He is, therefore, in the prime of life, and looks it. His complexion and eyes are as clear as those of an athlete, and his eyes, and his movements, and his talk are vibrating with energy. He stands, I should guess, about five feet eight or nine, has the figure and activity of an athletic youth of thirty, and in his hours of friendliness is as careless in speech, as unaffected in manner, as lacking in any suspicion of self- consciousness, or of any desire to impress you with his importance, as the simplest gentleman in the land.

Alas, how often this courageous and gentlemanly attitude has been taken advantage of! I have headed this chapter The Indiscreet, and I propose to examine these so-called indiscretions in some detail, but for the moment I must ask: Is there any excuse for, or any social punishment too severe for, the man who, introduced into a gentleman’s house in the guise of a gentleman, often by his own ambassador, leaves it, to blab every detail of the conversation of his host, with the gesticulations and exclamation points added by himself? To add a little to his own importance, he will steal out with the conversational forks and spoons in his pockets, and rush to a newspaper office to tell the world that he has kept his soiled napkin as a souvenir. The only indiscretion in such a case is when the host, or his advisers, or gentlemen anywhere, heed the lunatic laughter of such a social jackal.

To count one’s words, to tie up one’s phrases in caution, to dip each sentence in a diplomatic antiseptic, in the company of those to whom one has conceded hospitality, what a feeble policy! Better be brayed to the world every day as indiscreet than that!

It is a fine quality in a man to be in love with his job. Even though you have little sympathy with Savonarola’s fierceness or Wesley’s hardness, they were burning up all the time with their allegiance to their ideals of salvation. They served their Lord as lovers. Many men, even kings and princes and other potentates, give the impression that they would enjoy a holiday from their task. They seem to be harnessed to their duties rather than possessed by them; they appear like disillusioned husbands rather than as radiant lovers.

The German Emperor is not of that class. He loves his job. In his first proclamation to his people he declared that he had taken over the government “in the presence of the King of kings, promising God to be a just and merciful prince, cultivating piety and the fear of God.” He has proclaimed himself to be, as did Frederick the Great and his grandfather before him, the servant of his people. Certainly no one in the German Empire works harder, and what is far more difficult and far more self-denying, no one keeps himself fitter for his duties than he. He eats no red meat, drinks almost no alcohol, smokes very little, takes a very light meal at night, goes to bed early and gets up early. He rides, walks, shoots, plays tennis, and is as much in the open air as his duties permit.

It is not easy for the American to put side by side the attitudes of a man, who is the autocratic master and at the same time declares himself to be the first servant of his people. Perhaps if it is phrased differently it will not seem so contradictory. What this Emperor means, and what all princes who have believed in their right to rule meant, was not that they were the servants of their people, but the servants of their own obligations to their people, and of the duties that followed therefrom. If in addition to this the claim is made by the sovereign, that his right to rule is of divine origin, then his service to his obligations becomes of the highest and most sacred importance.

We should not allow our democratic prejudices to stifle our understanding in such matters. We are trying to get clearly in perspective a ruler, who claims to rule in obedience to no mandates from the people, but in obedience to God. We could not be ruled by such a one in America; and in England such a ruler would be deemed unconstitutional. It is elementary, but necessary to repeat, that we are writing of Germany and the Germans, and of their history, traditions, and political methods. We are making no defence of either the German Emperor or the German people; neither are we occupying an American pulpit to preach to them the superiority of other methods than their own. My sole task is to make clear the German situation, and not by any means to set up my own or my countrymen’s standards for their adoption. I am not searching for that paltry and ephemeral profit that comes from finding opportunities to laugh or to sneer. I am seeking for the German successes, and they are many, and for the reasons for them, and for the lessons that we may learn from them. Any other aim in writing of another people is ignoble.

This attitude of the ruler will be as incomprehensible to the democratic citizen as alchemy, but, in order to draw anything like true inferences or useful deductions, in order to understand the situation and to get a true likeness of the ruler, one must take this utterly unfamiliar and to us incomprehensible claim into consideration, and acknowledge its existence whether we admit the claim as justifiable or not. The relation of such a ruler to his people is like that of a Catholic bishop to his flock. The contract is not one made with hands, but is an inalienable right on the one hand, and an undisseverable tie upon the other. Bismarck wrote on this subject: “Für mich sind die Worte, ‘von Gottes Gnaden,’ welche christliche Herrscher ihrem Namen beifügen, kein leerer Schall, sondern ich sehe darin das Bekenntniss, des Fürsten das Scepter was ihnen Gott verliehen hat, nur nach Gottes Willen auf Erden führen wollen.”

On several occasions the German Emperor has made it unmistakably clear that this is his view of the origin and sanctity of his responsibilities. “If we have been able to accomplish what has been accomplished, it is due above all things to the fact that our house possesses a tradition by virtue of which we consider that we have been appointed by God to preserve and direct, for their own welfare, the people over whom he has given us power.” These words are from a speech made in 1897 at Bremen. In 1910, at Königsberg, he declares: “It was in this spot that my grandfather in his own right placed the royal crown of Prussia upon his head, insisting once again that it was bestowed upon him by the grace of God alone, and not by parliaments and meetings and decisions of the people. He thus regarded himself as the chosen instrument of heaven, and as such carried out his duties as a ruler and lord. I consider myself such an instrument of heaven, and shall go my way without regard to the views and opinions of the day.”

Prince Henry of Prussia, the popular, and deservedly popular, sailor brother of the Emperor, has signified his entire allegiance to this doctrine by saying that he was actuated by one single motive: “a desire to proclaim to the nations the gospel of your Majesty’s sacred person, and to preach that gospel alike to those who will listen and to those who will not.”

This language has a strange and far-away sound to us. It is as though one should come into the market-place with the bannered pomp of Milton’s prose upon his lips. The vicious would think it a trick, the idle would look upon it as a heavy form of joking, the intelligent would see in it a superstition, or a dream of knighthood that has faded into unrecognizable dimness. Some men, on the other hand, might wish that all rulers and governors whatsoever were equally touched with the sanctity of their obligations.

It is somewhat strange in this connection to remember, that we all wish to have our wives and daughters believers; that we all wish to bind to us those whom we love with more sacred bonds than those which we ourselves can supply. We are none of us loath to have those who keep our treasures, believe in some code higher than that of “honesty is the best policy.” As Archbishop Whately said: “Honesty is the best policy, but he who is honest for that reason is not an honest man.”

Far be it from me to appear as an advocate of the divine right of kings; but I am no fit person for this particular task if I have only a sniff, or a guffaw, as an explanation of another’s beliefs. History sparkles with the lives of men and women, who proclaimed themselves messengers and servants of God, obedient to him first, and utterly and courageously negligent of that feline commodity, public opinion. Every man, even to-day,

“Who each for the joy of the working, and each in his separate star,
Shall draw the Thing as he sees It for the God of Things as They Are,”

has a grain of this salt of divine independence in him. To-day, even as in the days of Pericles: “It is ever from the greatest hazards that the greatest honors are gained,” and the greatest hazard of all is to shut your visor and couch your lance and have at your task with a whispered: God and my Right! It is well to remember that under no government, whether democratic or aristocratic, has the individual ever been given any rights. He has always everywhere been pointed to his duties; his rights he must conquer for himself.

The liberal in theology, as the liberal in politics, has perhaps leaned too far toward softness. The democratization of religion has gone on with the rest, and in our rebound from Calvin, and John Knox, and Jonathan Edwards, we have left all discipline and authority out of account. We have preached so persistently of the fatherhood of God, of his nearness to us, of his profound pity for us, that we have lost sight of his justice and his power. This nearness has become a sort of innocuous neighborliness, and God is looked upon not as a ruler, but as a vaporish good fellow whose chief business it is to forgive. We have substituted a feverish-handed charity for a sinewy faith, and are excusing our divorce from divinely imposed duties, by a cheerful but illicit intercourse with chance acquaintances, all of whom are dubbed social service.

This Cashmere-shawl theology is as idle an interpretation of man’s relation to the universe, and far more debilitating, than any that has gone before. When we come to measure rulers who make divine claims for their duties, from any such coign of flabbiness as this, no wonder we stand dumb. I am willing to concede that perhaps even an emperor has been baptized with the blood of the martyrs, and feels himself to be in all sincerity the instrument of God; if we are to understand this one, we must admit so much.

In certain departments of life, we not only grant, but we demand, that our wives and mothers should look upon their special duties and peculiar functions as divinely imparted, and as beyond argument, and as above coercion. This assumption, therefore, of inalienable rights is not so strange to us; on the contrary, it is an every-day affair in most of our lives. This particular manifestation of it is all that is new or surprising. We Americans and English look upon it as dangerous, but the Germans, more mystical and far more lethargic about liberty than are we, are not greatly disturbed by it. The secular press, largely in Jewish hands, and the new socialist members of the Reichstag, jealous of their prerogatives but unable to assert them, criticise and even scream their abhorrence and unbelief; but I am much mistaken, if the mass of the Germans are at heart much disturbed by their Emperor’s assertions of his divine right to rule. A conservative member of the Reichstag speaks of, “a parliament which will maintain the monarch in his strong position as the wearer of the German imperial crown, not the semblance of a monarch but one that is dependent upon something higher than party and parliament - one dependent upon the King of all kings.”

To a thoroughbred American, with two and more centuries of the traditions of independence behind him, this question of the divine right of kings is a commonplace. He is a king himself, he holds his own rights to be divine, and his influence and his power to be limited only by his character and his abilities, like that of any other sovereign. He may rule over few or many, he may control the destiny of only one or of many subjects, he may be well known or little known, but that he is a sovereign individual by the grace of God, it never occurs to him to doubt. It is perhaps for this reason that the real American is placid and unself-conscious before this claim. It is those who admit and suffer from the exactions and tyrannies of such a claim that he pities, not the man who makes it, whom he distrusts. I carry my sovereignty under my hat, says the American; if any man or men can knock off the hat and take away the sovereignty, there is a fair field and no favor; for those who whimper and complain of tyranny he has long since ceased to have a high regard.

That William the Second is the chief figure of interest in the world to-day is due, not alone to this assumption of a divine relation to the state, or to his own vigorous and electric personality, but to the freedom to develop and to express that personality. Men in politics have dwindled in importance and in power, as the voters have increased in numbers and in influence. Genius must be true to itself to bloom luxuriantly. It is impossible to be seeking the suffrage of a constituency and at the same time to be wholly one’s self. The German Emperor is unhampered, as is no other ruler, by considerations of popular favor; and at the same time he directs and influences not Russian peasants, nor Turkish slaves, but an instructed, enlightened, and ambitious people. This environment is unique in the world to-day, and the Germans as a whole seem to consider their ruler a valuable asset, despite occasional vagaries that bring down their own and foreign criticism upon him.

Here we have a versatile and vigorous personality with no shadow of a stain upon his character, and with no question upon the part of his bitterest enemy of the honesty of his intentions, or of his devotion to his country’s interests. So far as he has been assailed abroad, it is on the score that he has made his country so powerful in the last twenty-five years that Germany is a menace to other powers; so far as he has been criticised at home it is on the score of his indiscretions.

It is of prime importance, therefore, both to glance at the progress of Germany and to examine these so-called indiscretions. Throughout these chapters will be found facts and figures dealing with the fairy-like change which has taken place in Germany since my own student days. I can remember when a chimney was a rare sight. Now there are almost as many manufacturing towns as then there were chimneys. Leipzig was a big country town, Pforzheim, Chemnitz, Oschatz, Elberfeld, Riessa, Kiel, Essen, Rheinhausen, and their armies of laborers, and their millions of output, were mere shadows of what they are now.

In 1873, when Bismarck began his attempts at railway legislation, Germany was divided into sixty-three “railway provinces,” and there were fifteen hundred different tariffs, and it is to be remembered that it was only as late as 1882 that the state system of railways at last triumphed in Prussia. In only ten years the railway trackage has increased from 49,041 to 52,216 miles; the number of locomotives from 18,291 to 26,612; freight-cars from 398,000 to 558,000; the passengers carried from 804,000,000 to 1,457,000,000; and the tons of freight carried from 341,000,000 tons to 519,000,000 tons. In Prussia alone there are 1,000,000 more horses, 1,000,000 more beef cattle, and 10,000,000 more pigs. The total production of beet sugar in the world approximates 7,000,000 tons; of this amount Germany produces 2,500,000 tons. Great Britain consumes more sugar per head of the population than any other country, and of her consumption of 1,460,000 tons of beet sugar all of it is produced from beets grown on the continent. Between 1885 and 1912 the population increased from 46,000,000 to 66,000,000. The expenditure on the navy has increased in the last ten years from $47,500,000 to $110,000,000, and the number of men from 31,157 to 60,805, with another increase in both money and men, voted at the moment of this writing in the summer of 1912.

The debt of Germany, exclusive of paper money, in 1887 was 486,201,000 marks; in 1903 it stood at 2,733,500,000. In 1911 the funded debt of the empire was 4,524,000,000 marks, and the funded debt of the states 14,880,000,000; and the floating debt amounts to 991,000,000, of which Prussia alone bears 610,000,000 and the empire 300,000,000. Between the years 1871 and 1897 a debt of $500,000,000 was incurred, bearing an average interest charge of 3 3/4 per cent. In the year 1908 the combined expenditures of the states and of the empire reached the enormous total of $1,775,000,000. The debt of the city of Berlin alone in 1910 had reached $110,750,000 and has increased in the last two years.

For purposes of comparison one may note that our own later national budgets run roughly to $1,000,000,000. The British budget for 1911 was $906,420,000. After the French war, speculation on a large scale ensued. The payment of the $1,000,000,000 indemnity had a bad effect. As has often happened in America, money, or the mere means of exchange, was taken for wealth. The earth will be as cold as the moon before men learn that the only real wealth is health. Many schemes and companies were floated and after 1873 there was a prolonged financial crisis in Germany. It is said that bankruptcy and the liquidation of bubble companies entailed a loss of a round $90,000,000. It was in 1876-7, when Germany was thus suffering, that the policy of protection was mooted and finally put into operation by Bismarck in 1879. Ten years later the laws for accident, old age, and sickness insurance were passed, at the instigation and under the direct influence of the present Emperor.

The tonnage of steam vessels under 4,000 tons in Great Britain (net tons) was, some five years ago, 8,165,527; in Germany (gross tons), 977,410; but the tonnage of steam vessels of 4,000 tons and over was in Great Britain 1,446,486, in Germany 1,119,537! It should be added that no small part of Great Britain’s big ships belong to the American Shipping Trust, sailing under the British flag. Albert Ballin became a director of the Hamburg-American line in 1886, and was made general director in 1900. During his directorship the capital of the line has been increased from 15,000,000 to 125,000,000 of marks, and the number of steamers from 26 to 170.

Germany’s combined export and import trade in 1880 was $1,429,025,000; in 1890, $1,875,050,000; and in 1905 it was $3,324,018,000; in 1910, $4,019,072,250. The German production of coal and coal products in 1910 was the highest in its history, amounting to 265,148,232 metric tons. It would be easy enough to chronicle the commercial and industrial strides of Germany during the last quarter of a century by the compilation of a catalogue of figures. It is not my intention to persuade the reader to believe in any such fantastic theory as that the present Kaiser is entirely responsible for this progress. I am no Pygmalion that I can make an Emperor by breathing prayers before pages of statistics.

It is only fair, however, in any sketch of the Emperor to give this skeleton outline of what has taken place in the empire over which he rules, and which, in certain quarters, it is said, he menaces by his predilection for war. These few figures spell peace, they do not spell war, and the ruler who has some 700,000 armed men at his back, and a navy the second in strength in the world guarding his shores, and a mercantile marine carrying his trade which is hard on the heels of Great Britain as a rival, but who has none the less kept his country at peace with the world for twenty-five years, may be credited at least with good intentions.

It may be said in answer to this same argument that this building and training and enriching of a nation are a threat in themselves. True, a strong man is more dangerous than a weak one; but it is equally true that a strong man is a greater safeguard than a weak one where the question of peace is at stake. It is also true that a rich and powerful man must needs take more precautions against attack and robbery than a tramp. A tramp seldom carries even a bunch of keys, and pays no premium on fire, accident, or burglary insurance.

William the Second knows his history as well as any of his people, and incomparably better than his English, French, or American critics. He knows that only twenty years after the death of Frederick the Great, the Prussian power went down before Napoleon like a house of cards, and that the country’s humiliation was stamped in bold outlines when Napoleon was received in Berlin with the ringing of bells, the firing of cannons, and he himself greeted as a savior and a benefactor. That was only a hundred years ago. Is it an indiscretion, then, when the present ruler, speaking at Brandenburg the 5th of March, 1890, says: “I look upon the people and nation handed on to me as a responsibility conferred upon me by God, and that it is, as is written in the Bible, my duty to increase this heritage, for which one day I shall be called upon to give an account; those who try to interfere with my task, I shall crush”?

On his accession to the throne his first two proclamations were to the army and the navy, his third to the people. On the 14th of July, 1888, he reviewed the fleet at Kiel, and for the first time an Emperor of Germany and King of Prussia appeared there in the uniform of an admiral. In April, 1897, Queen Victoria celebrated the sixtieth year of her reign, and Prince Henry represented Germany, appearing as admiral of the fleet in an old battle-ship, the King William. On the 24th of April the Emperor telegraphed to his brother: “I regret exceedingly that I cannot put at your disposition for this celebration a better ship, especially when all other countries are appearing with their finest ships of war. It is a sad consequence of the manoeuvring of those unpatriotic persons who have obstructed the construction of even the most necessary war-ships. But I shall know no rest till I have placed our navy on a par for strength with our army.” From that day to this he has gone steadily forward demanding of his people a strong army and a powerful fleet. He now has both. He has pulled Germany out of danger and beyond the reach, for the moment at least, of any repetition of the catastrophe and humiliation of a hundred years ago. This is a solid fact, and for this situation the Emperor is largely, one might almost say wholly, responsible.

One hears and one reads criticisms of the Emperor’s habit of speaking and writing of “my navy.” It is said that the other states of Germany have borne taxation to build the fleet, and that it is no more the Emperor’s than that of the King of Bavaria, or of Würtemberg, or of Saxony. This is the petty, pin-pricking babble of boarding-school girls, or of those official supernumeraries who have turned sour in their retirement. Even the honest democrat is made indignant. If the German navy is not the work of William the Second, then its parentage is far to seek; and if the German navy is not proud to be called “my navy,” it is wofully lacking in gratitude to its creator.

No man who looks back over his own career, say of twenty-five years, but is both chastened and amused. He is chastened by the unforeseen dangers that he has escaped; he is amused by the certificates of failure, and the prophecies of disaster, that always everywhere accompany the man who takes part in the game in preference to sitting in the reserved seats, or peeking through a hole in the fence. I have not been honored with any such intimate association with the German Emperor as would enable me to say whether he has a highly developed sense of humor or not. I can only say for myself, that if I had lived through his Majesty’s last twenty-five years, I should need no other fillip to digestion than my chuckles over the prophecies of my enemies.

It has been said of him that he is volatile; that he flies from one task to another, finishing nothing; that his artistic tastes are the extravagant dreams of a Nero; that he loves publicity as a worn and obese soprano loves the centre of the stage; that his indiscretions would bring about the discharge of the most inconspicuous petty official. Others speak and write of him as a hero of mythology, as a mystic and a dreamer, looking for guidance to the traditions of mediaeval knighthood; while others, again, dub him a modernist, insist that he is a commercial traveller, hawking the wares of his country wherever he goes, and with an eye ever to the interests of Bremen and Hamburg and Essen and Pforzheim. Again, you hear that he is a Prussian junker, or that he is a cavalry officer, with all the prejudices and limitations of such a one; while, on the other hand, he is chided for enlisting the financial help of rich Jews and industrials. He is versatile, but versatility is a virtue so long as it does not extend to one’s principles. Every man who has profoundly influenced the life of the world, from Moses to Lincoln, has been versatile. Carlyle goes so far as to say: “I confess, I have no notion of a truly great man that could not be all sorts of men.” He speaks French well enough to address the Académie; he speaks English as well as a cultivated American, and no one speaks it more distinctly, more crisply, more trippingly upon the tongue, these days; he preaches a capital sermon; he is an accomplished binder of books; he is a successful and enthusiastic farmer, and he is frankly audacious in his loves and hatreds, his ambitions and his beliefs. He has, in short, no vermin blood in him at any rate. If you do not like him, you know why; and if you do, you know why as easily. He even knows what he believes about woman’s suffrage and about God, a rare conciseness of thinking in these troublous times.

There stands before you a man apparently as sound in mind and in body as any man who treads German soil; a man of great vivacity of mind and manner, and of wholesome delight in living; who bears huge responsibilities with good humor, and that most unwholesome of all things, undisputed power, with humility. At a banquet in Brandenburg the 5th of March, 1890, speaking of his many voyages, he said: “He who, alone at sea, standing on the bridge, with nothing over him but God’s heaven, has communed with himself will not mistake the value of such voyages. I could wish for many of my countrymen that they might live through similar hours of self-contemplation, where a man takes stock of what he has tried to do, and of what he has accomplished. Then it is that a man is cured of vanity, and we have all of us need of that.”

It is obvious that a man cannot be modest, as the above quotation would indicate, and at the same time preening with vanity; a Sir Philip Sidney and a Jew peddler; a careless, dashing cavalry officer or proud Prussian squire, and at the same time a wary and astute insurance agent for the empire; a preacher of duty and honor, and belief in God, and at the same time a political comedian deceiving his rivals abroad, and hoodwinking his subjects at home.

Not a few men, even of slight powers of observation and of meagre experience, have noted the strange fact that a blank and direct statement of the truth is very apt to be put down as a lie; and that a man who frankly expresses his beliefs and ambitions, and openly goes about his business and his pleasures with no thought of concealment, is often regarded as Machiavellian and deceitful, because a timid and cautious world finds it hard to believe that he is really as audacious as he appears.

Even those with the most limited list, of the great names of history at their disposal, cannot fail to remember that simplicity and directness have in the persons of their highest exemplars been misunderstood; hunted down like wild beasts, burned, crucified, and then, when they were well out of the way, crowned and held up to humanity as the saviors of the race. We will have none of them when authority, faith, truth, courage, show us our distorted images in the mirror of their lives. Crucify him, crucify him! has always been the cry when such a one asserts his moral kingship, or his sonship to God, or his audacious intention to live his own life; and in less tragic fashion, but none the less along the same lines, the world tends to pick at, and to fray the moral garments of, its leaders still to-day. When such a one succeeds through sheer simplicity, then that last feeble epitaph of mediocrity is applied to him: “He is lucky,” because so few people realize that “luck,” is merely not to be dependent upon luck.

It is apparent from the quotations I have given, and many more of the same tenor are at our disposal, that the personality we are studying has a very definite image of his place in the world, of the duties he is called upon to perform, of his rights according to his own conception of his authority and responsibilities, and of his intentions.

It is equally apparent that he looks upon history in quite another way than that usually accepted by the modern scientific historian. Taine and Green may explain everything, even kings and emperors, by the forces of climate, environment, and the slow-heaving influence of the people. This school of historians will tell you how Charlemagne, and Luther, and Cromwell, and Napoleon are to be accounted for by purely material explanations.

The German Emperor apparently believes that the history of the world and the development of mankind are due to a series of mighty factors, mysteriously endowed from on high and bearing the names of men, and not infrequently the names of emperors and kings. He is continually recalling his ancestors, the Great Elector, Frederick the Great, and William I, his grandfather. These men made Prussia and Prussia made the German Empire, he declares. To the Brandenburg Parliament he says: “It is the great merit of my ancestors that they have always stood aloof from and above all parties, and that they have always succeeded in making political parties combine for the welfare of the whole people.”

Due to a quality in the German character that need not be discussed here, it is true that they have been led, and driven, and welded by powerful individuals. No Magna Charta, no Cromwell, no Declaration of Independence is to be found in German history. No vigorous demand from the people themselves marks their progress. You can read all there is of German history in the biographies of the Great Elector, of Frederick William the First, of Frederick the Great, of York, of von Stein, Hardenberg, Sharnhorst, and Blücher, of Bismarck, William I, and the present Emperor.

What the Kaiser believes of history is true of German history. If he asserts himself as he does in Germany, it is because two hundred and fifty years of German history put him wholly and entirely in the right. It is to be presumed that what every student of German history may see for himself, has not escaped the flexible intelligence of the present Emperor, and that is, that only the autocratic kings of Prussia succeeded, and that only an autocratic statesman succeeded, in bringing the whole country into line, by the acknowledgment of the King of Prussia, and his heirs forever, as German emperors.

The first so-called indiscretion of the present Emperor was magnificent. He dismissed Bismarck two years after he came to the throne. If you have ever been the owner of a yacht and your sailing-master has grown to be a tyrant, and you have taken your courage in your hand and bundled him over the side, you have had in a microcosmic way the sensations of such an experience.

It is said that Bismarck, then seventy-five years old, and since 1862 accustomed to undisputed power, demurred to the wish of the Emperor that the other ministers should have access to him directly, and not as heretofore only through the chancellor. It is said too that the matter-of-fact and somewhat cynical Bismarck, had but scanty respect for the mystical view of his grandfather as a saint, that the Emperor everywhere proclaimed. In 1896, the 20th of February, in speaking of his grandfather, he refers to him as: “The Emperor William, that personality which has become for us in some sort that of a saint.”

Bismarck, too, objected to the Emperor’s policy as regards the treatment of, and the legislation for, the workingmen. On February the 5th, 1890, he writes to Bismarck: “It is the duty of the state to regulate the duration and conditions of work in such manner that the health and the morality of the workingman may be preserved, and that his needs may be satisfied and his desire for equality before the law assured.”

“Now this is the tale of the Council the German Kaiser decreed,
“And the young king said:-‘I have found it, the road to the rest ye seek:
The strong shall wait for the weary, and the hale shall halt for the weak;
With the even tramp of an army where no man breaks from the line,
Ye shall march to peace and plenty, in the bond of brotherhood — sign!’ ”

Whatever the reasons, the criticisms, or the causes, the man whom we have been describing was as certain to dismiss Bismarck from office, as a bird is certain to fly and not to swim. The ruler who at a banquet May the 4th, 1891, proclaimed: “There is only one master of the nation: and that is I, and I will not abide any other”; and later, on the 16th of November, in an address to recruits said: “I need Christian soldiers, soldiers who say their Pater Noster. The soldier should not have a will of his own, but you should all have but one will and that is my will; there is but one law for you and that is mine.” Again, in addressing the recruits for the navy on the 5th of March, 1895, he said to them: “Just as I, as Emperor and ruler, consecrate my life and my strength to the service of the nation, so you are pledged to give your lives to me.” Such a man could not share his rule with Bismarck.

Bismarck left Berlin amid groans and tears. A prop had been rudely pushed from beneath the empire. The young Emperor would stumble and sway, and fall without this strong guide beside him. Men said this was the first sign of an imperious will and temper.

There is an Arab proverb which runs: “When God wishes to destroy an ant he gives it wings.” The Kaiser was to be given power for his own destruction. But what has happened? Absolutely nothing of these evil prophecies. In 1884 Bismarck was saying to Gerhard Rohlfs, the African explorer: “The main thing is, we neither can nor really want to colonize. We shall never have a fleet like France. Our artisans and lawyers and time-expired soldiers are no good as colonists.” If the ideas of William the Second were to prevail, it was time that Bismarck went over the side as pilot of the ship of state. The Kaiser in appropriate terms regretted the loss of this tried public servant and said: “However, the course remains the same — full steam ahead!”

Three days after the Jameson raid, on the 3d of January, 1896, the Kaiser telegraphed to President Krüger: “I beg to express to you my sincere congratulations that, without help from foreign powers, you have succeeded with your own people and by your own strength in driving out the armed bands which attempted to disturb the peace of your country, and in reestablishing order and in defending the independence of your people from attacks from outside.”

On the 28th of October, 1908, The Daily Telegraph of London published a long interview with the Emperor, the gist of which was that the British press and people continued to distrust him, while all the time he was and had been the friend of Great Britain. The Emperor cited instances of his friendship, declared the English were as mad as March hares not to believe in him; insisted that by reason of Germany’s increasing foreign commerce, and on account of the growing menace to peace in the Pacific Ocean, Germany was determined to have an adequate fleet, which perhaps one day even England might be glad to have alongside of her own.

In addition to these two incidents, the Emperor had written a letter to Lord Tweedmouth, who was already then a sick man, and probably not wholly responsible, in which it was said he had offered advice as to the increase of the British navy.

I have described these furious indiscretions, as they were called at the time, together, though they were years apart; for these utterances, and the constant repetition of his sense of responsibility to God, and not to the people he governs, are the heart of this whole contention that the German Emperor is indiscreet, is indiscreet even to the point of damaging his own prestige, and injuring his country’s interests abroad.

Of all these so-called indiscretions there is the question to ask: Should these things have been said? Should these things have been written? There are several things to be said in answer to these questions. I shall treat each one in turn, but all these statements told the truth and cleared the air. The Krüger telegram was not written by the Emperor, and when the worst construction is put upon it, it expressed what? It was merely the condemnation of freebooting methods, a condemnation, be it said, that it received from many right- minded and sincerely patriotic Englishmen, a condemnation too that was re-echoed from America. Only the honorable and winning personality of one of the most patriotic and charming men in England, Sir Starr Jameson, saved the raid from looking like piracy. A brave man spoke his mind about it, and he happened to be in a position so conspicuous that the rumble of his words was heard afar.

So far as The Daily Telegraph interview is concerned, the secret history of the incident has never been fully divulged. One may say, however, without fear of contradiction that the importance of the matter was unduly magnified, by those, both at home and abroad, who had something to gain by exaggeration. It is admitted on all sides by those best informed that at any rate the Emperor was neither responsible for the publication, a point to be kept in mind, nor for the choice of expressions used in the interview.

The letter to Lord Tweedmouth was a friendly communication dealing with the conditions of the British and German fleets in the past and present, and without a word in it that might not have been published in The Times. It was quite innocent of the sinister significance placed upon it by those who had not seen it; and the British Ministry declined to publish it for entirely different reasons, reasons in no way connected with the German Emperor.

As we read The Daily Telegraph interview to-day, it is a plain document. Every word of it is true. The moment one looks at it from the point of view, that the Emperor of Germany is sincerely desirous of an amiable understanding with England, and that he is, for the peace and quiet of the world, working toward that end, there is no adverse criticism to be passed upon it. The English are thoroughly and completely mistaken about the attitude of the German Emperor toward them. He is far and away the best and most powerful friend they have in Europe, and I, for one, would be willing to forgive him were he irritated at their misunderstanding of him. Personally, I have not the shadow of a doubt that had France or Russia treated the German Emperor with the cool distrust shown him by the British, the German army and fleet would have moved ere this.

To those who know the Britisher he is forgiven for those luxuries of insular stupidity which punctuate his history. I know what a fine fellow he is, and I pass them by. Mr. Churchill speaks of the German fleet as a “luxury”; but this is only one of those cold-storage impromptus that a reputation for cleverness must keep on hand, and when Lord Haldane in a clumsy attempt to praise the German Emperor speaks of him as “half English” I laugh, as one laughs at the story of fat Gibbon kneeling to propose to a lady and requiring a servant to get him on his legs again. British courting often needs a lackey to keep it on its legs.

Could anything be more burningly irritable to the Germans than those two unnecessary statements? For the moment I am dealing with the attitude of the Emperor alone. Of the tirades of Chamberlain and Woltmann, Schmoller, Treitschke, Delbrück, Zorn, and other under-exercised professors, one may speak elsewhere. They are as unpardonable as the yokel rhetoric of our British friends. Of the Emperor’s insistence upon his friendliness, of his outspoken betrayal of his real feelings, of his audacious policy of telling the blunt truth, I am, alas, no fair judge, for I am too entirely the advocate of keeping as few cats in the bag as possible. If these things had not been said and written, it is true that there would have been no tumult; having been said and written, I fail to see the slightest indication in the political life of either Germany or England to-day that they did harm. Certainly, from his own point of view of what his position entails, they can hardly, as the radicals in Germany claim, be considered as unconstitutional or beyond his prerogative.

When the German Emperor says: “I,” he refers to the authority and responsibility and dignity of the German imperial crown. He is not magnifying his personal importance; he is emphasizing the dignity and importance of every German citizen. Let us try to understand the situation before we pass judgment! Both German radicalism and German socialism are peculiar to Germany, and everywhere misunderstood abroad. They both demand things of the government for the easement of their position, they both demand certain privileges, but they do not seek or want either authority or responsibility. Look at the figures of their proportionate increase and compare this with their actual influence in the Reichstag to-day. From 1881 to 1911, here is the percentage of votes cast by the five representative political parties:

If it were thought for a moment in Germany that the Socialists could come into real power, their vote and the number of their representatives in the Reichstag would dwindle away in one single election.

The average German is no leader of men, no lover of an emergency, no social or political colonist, and he would shrink from the initiative and daring and endurance demanded by a real political revolution and a real change of authority, as a hen from water. The very quality in his ruler that we take for granted he must dislike is the quality that at the bottom of his heart he adores, and he reposes upon it as the very foundation of his sense of security, and as the very bulwark behind which he makes grimaces and shakes his fist at his enemies. Such men as the present chancellor, von Bethmann-Hollweg, a very calm spectator of his country’s doings, and the Emperor himself, both know this.

As he looks at history and at life, it follows that he must be interested in everything that concerns his people, and not infrequently take a hand in settling questions, or in pushing enterprises, that seem too widely apart to be dealt with by one man, and too far afield for his constitutional obligations to profit by his interference. Certainly German progress shows that the Germans can have no ground to quote: “Quicquid delirant reges, plectuntur Achivi,” of their Emperor.

In the discussion of this question, I may remind my American readers, although the German constitution is dealt with elsewhere, that there is one difference between Germany and America politically, that must never be left out of our calculations. Such constitution and such rights as the German citizens have, were granted them by their rulers. The people of Prussia, or of Bavaria, or of Würtemberg, have not given certain powers to, and placed certain limitations upon, their rulers; on the contrary, their rulers have given the people certain of their own prerogatives and political privileges, and granted to the people as a favor, a certain share in government and certain powers, that only so long as seventy years ago belonged to the sovereign alone. It is not what the people have won and then shared with the ruler, but it is what the ruler has inherited or won and shared with the people, that makes the groundwork of the constitutions of the various states, and of the empire of Germany. Nothing has been taken away from the people of Prussia or from any other state in Germany that they once had; but certain rights and privileges have been granted by the rulers that were once wholly theirs. Bear this in mind, that it is William II and his ancestors who made Prussia Prussia, and voluntarily gave Prussians certain political rights, and not the citizens of Prussia who stormed the battlements of equal rights and made a treaty with their sovereign.

The King of Prussia is the largest landholder and the richest citizen of Prussia. We have seen what he expects of his navy and of his army. Speaking on the 6th of September, 1894, he says: “Gentlemen, opposition on the part of the Prussian nobility to their King is a monstrosity.”

But arid details are not history, and in this connection let us have done with them. I have documented this chapter with dates and quotations because the situation politically, is so far away from the experience or knowledge of the American, that he must be given certain facts to assist his imagination in making a true picture. I have done this, too, that the Kaiser may have his real background when we undertake to place him understandingly in the modern world. Here we have patriarchal rule still strong and still undoubting, coupled with the most successful social legislation, the most successful state control of railways, mines, and other enterprises; and a progress commercial and industrial during the last quarter of a century, second to none.

This ruler believes it to be essentially a part of his business to be a Lorenzo de Medici to his people in art; their high priest in religion; their envoy extraordinary to foreign peoples; their watchful father and friend in legislation dealing with their daily lives; their war-lord, and their best example in all that concerns domestic happiness and patriotic citizenship. He fulfils the words of the old German chronicle which reads: “Merito a nobis nostrisque posteris pater patriae appelatur quia erat egregius defensor et fortissimus propugnator nihili pendens vitam suam contra omnia adversa propter justitiam opponere.”

If history is not altogether valueless in its description of symptoms, the Germans are of a softer mould than some of us, more malleable, rather tempted to imitate than led by self-confidence to trust to their own ideals, and less hard in confronting the demands of other peoples, that they should accept absorption by them. Spurned and disdained by Louis XIV, they fawned upon him, built palaces like his, dressed like his courtiers, wrote and spoke his language, copied his literary models, and even bored themselves with mistresses because this was the fashion at Versailles. He stole from them, only to be thrown the kisses of flattery in return. He sneered at them, only to be begged for his favors in return. He took their cities in time of peace, and they acknowledged the theft by a smirking adulation that he allowed one of their number to be crowned a king.

As for Napoleon, he performed a prolonged autopsy upon the Germans. They were dismembered or joined together as suited his plans. At his beck they fought against one another, or against Russia, or against England. He tossed them crowns, that they still wear proudly, as a master tosses biscuits to obedient spaniels. He put his poor relatives to rule over them, here and there, and they were grateful. He marched into their present capital, took away their monuments, and the sword of Frederick the Great, and they hailed him with tears and rejoicing as their benefactor, while their wittiest poet and sweetest singer, lauded him to the skies.

It is unpleasant to recall, but quite unfair to forget, these happenings of the last two hundred years in the history of the German people. What would any man say, after this, was their greatest need, if not self-confidence; if not twenty-five years of peace to enable them to recover from their beatings and humiliation; if not a powerful army and navy to give them the sense of security, by which alone prosperity and pride in their accomplishments and in themselves can be fostered; if not a ruler who holds ever before their eyes their ideals and the unfaltering energy required of them to attain them!

What nation would not be self-conscious after such dire experiences? What nation would not be tenderly sensitive as to its treatment by neighboring powers? What nation would not be even unduly keen to resent any appearance of an attempt to jostle it from its hard-won place in the sun? Their self-consciousness and sensitiveness and vanity are patent, but they are pardonable. As the leader of the Conservative party in the Reichstag, Doctor von Heydebrandt, speaking at Breslau in October, 1911, anent the Morocco controversy, said, after, alluding to the “bellicose impudence” of Lloyd-George: “The [British] ministry thrusts its fist under our nose, and declares, I alone command the world. It is bitterly hard for us who have 1870 behind us.” They feel that they should no longer be treated to such bumptiousness.

I trust that I am no swashbuckler, but I have the greatest sympathy with the present Emperor in his capacity as war-lord, and in his insistent stiffening of Germany’s martial backbone.