Since the outbreak of the war the pamphlet literature in the
countries of the Entente has been full of citations from German
political writers. In England, in particular, the names and works of
Bernhardi and of Treitschke have become more familiar than they appear
to have been in Germany prior to the war. This method of selecting for
polemical purposes certain tendencies of sentiment and theory, and
ignoring all others, is one which could be applied, with damaging
results, to any country in the world. Mr. Angell has shown in his
“Prussianism in England” how it might be applied to ourselves; and a
German, no doubt, into whose hands that book might fall would draw
conclusions about public opinion here similar to those which we have
drawn about public opinion in Germany. There is jingoism in all
countries, as there is pacifism in all countries. Nevertheless, I think
it is true to say that the jingoism of Germany has been peculiar both
in its intensity and in its character. This special quality appears to
be due both to the temperament and to the recent history of the German
nation. The Germans are romantic, as the French are impulsive, the
English sentimental, and the Russians religious. There is some real
meaning in these generalisations. They are easily to be felt when one
comes into contact with a nation, though they may be hard to establish
or define. When I say that the Germans are romantic, I mean that they
do not easily or willingly see things as they are. Their temperament is
like a medium of coloured glass. It magnifies, distorts, conceals,
transmutes. And this is as true when their intellectual attitude is
realistic as when it is idealistic. In the Germany of the past, the
Germany of small States, to which all non-Germans look back with such
sympathy and such regret, their thinkers and poets were inspired by
grandiose intellectual abstractions. They saw ideas, like gods, moving
the world, and actual men and women, actual events and things, were but
the passing symbols of these supernatural powers; 1866 and 1870 ended
all that. The unification of Germany, in the way we have discussed,
diverted all their interest from speculation about the universe, life,
and mankind, to the material interests of their new country. Germany
became the preoccupation of all Germans. From abstractions they turned
with a new intoxication to what they conceived to be the concrete.
Entering thus late upon the stage of national politics, they devoted
themselves, with their accustomed thoroughness, to learning and
bettering what they conceived to be the principles and the practice
which had given success to other nations. In this quest no scruples
should deter them, no sentimentality hamper, no universal ideals
distract. Yet this, after all, was but German romanticism assuming
another form. The objects, it is true, were different. “Actuality” had
taken the place of ideals, Germany of Humanity. But by the German
vision the new objects were no less distorted than the old. In dealing
with “Real-politik” (which is the German translation of
Machiavellianism), with “expansion,” with “survival of the fittest,”
and all the other shibboleths of world-policy, their outlook remained
as absolute and abstract as before, as contemptuous of temperament and
measure, as blind to those compromises and qualifications, those
decencies, so to speak, of nature, by which reality is constituted. The
Germans now saw men instead of gods, but they saw them as trees
walking.
German imperialism, then, while it involves the same intellectual
presuppositions, the same confusions, the same erroneous arguments, the
same short-sighted ambitions, as the imperialism of other countries,
exhibits them all in an extreme degree. All peoples admire themselves.
But the self-adoration of Germans is so naive, so frank, so
unqualified, as to seem sheerly ridiculous to more experienced
nations.[1] The English and the French, too, believe their civilization
to be the best in the world. But English common-sense and French sanity
would prevent them from announcing to other peoples that they proposed
to conquer them, morally or materially, for their good. All Jingoes
admire and desire war. But nowhere else in the modern world is to be
found such a debauch of “romantic” enthusiasm, such a wilful blindness
to all the realities of war, as Germany has manifested both before and
since the outbreak of this world-catastrophe. A reader of German
newspapers and tracts gets at last a feeling of nausea at the very
words Wir Deutsche, followed by the eternal Helden,
Heldenthum, Heldenthat, and is inclined to thank God if he indeed
belong to a nation sane enough to be composed of Haendler.
The very antithesis between Helden (heroes) and Haendler
(hucksters), with which all Germany is ringing, is an illustration of
the romantic quality that vitiates their intelligence. In spite of the
fact that they are one of the greatest trading and manufacturing
nations of the world, and that precisely the fear of losing their trade
and markets has been, as they constantly assert, a chief cause that has
driven them to war, they speak as though Germany were a kind of
knight-errant, innocent of all material ambitions, wandering through
the world in the pure, disinterested service of God and man. On the
other hand, because England is a great commercial Power, they suppose
that no Englishman lives for anything but profit. Because they
themselves have conscription, and have to fight or be shot, they infer
that every German is a noble warrior. Because the English volunteer,
they assume that they only volunteer for their pay. Germany, to them,
is a hero clad in white armour, magnanimous, long-suffering, and
invincible. Other nations are little seedy figures in black coats,
inspired exclusively by hatred and jealousy of the noble German,
incapable of a generous emotion or an honourable act, and destined, by
the judgment of history, to be saved, if they can be saved at all, by
the great soul and dominating intellect of the Teuton.
It is in this intoxicating atmosphere of temperament and mood that
the ideas and ambitions of German imperialists work and move. They are
essentially the same as those of imperialists in other countries. Their
philosophy of history assumes an endless series of wars, due to the
inevitable expansion of rival States. Their ethics means a belief in
force and a disbelief in everything else. Their science is a crude
misapplication of Darwinism, combined with invincible ignorance of the
true bearings of science upon life, and especially of those facts and
deductions about biological heredity which, once they are understood,
will make it plain that war degrades the stock of all nations,
victorious and vanquished alike, and that the decline of civilizations
is far more plausibly to be attributed to this cause than to the moral
decadence of which history is always ready, after the event, to accuse
the defeated Power. One peculiarity, perhaps, there is in the outlook
of German imperialism, and that is its emphasis on an unintelligible
and unreal abstraction of “race.” Germans, it is thought, are by
biological quality the salt of the earth. Every really great man in
Europe, since the break-up of the Roman Empire, has been a German, even
though it might appear, at first sight, to an uninstructed observer,
that he was an Italian or a Frenchman or a Spaniard. Not all Germans,
however, are, they hold, as yet included in the German Empire, or even
in the German-Austrian combination. The Flemish are Germans, the Dutch
are Germans, the English even are Germans, or were before the war had
made them, in Germany's eyes, the offscouring of mankind. Thus, a great
task lies before the German Empire: on the one hand, to bring within
its fold the German stocks that have strayed from it in the wanderings
of history; on the other, to reduce under German authority those other
stocks that are not worthy to share directly in the citizenship of the
Fatherland. The dreams of conquest which are the real essence of all
imperialism are thus supported in Germany by arguments peculiar to
Germans. But the arguments put forward are not the real determinants of
the attitude. The attitude, in any country, whatever it may be called,
rests at bottom on sheer national vanity. It is the belief in the
inherent superiority of one's own civilization, and the desire to
extend it, by force if need be, throughout the world. It matters little
what arguments in its support this passion to dominate may garner from
that twilight region in which the advanced guard of science is
labouring patiently to comprehend Nature and mankind. Men take from the
treasury of truth what they are able to take. And what imperialists
take is a mirror to their own ambition and pride.
Now, as to the ambitions of this German jingoism there is no manner
of doubt. Germans are nothing if not frank. And this kind of German
does want to conquer and annex, not only outside Europe but within it.
We must not, however, infer that the whole of Germany has been infected
with this virus. The summary I have set down in the last few pages
represents the impression made on an unsympathetic mind by the
literature of Pangermanism. Emerging from such reading—and it is the
principal reading of German origin which has been offered to the
British public since the war—there is a momentary illusion, “That is
Germany!” Of course it is not, any more than the Morning Post or
the National Review is England. Germans, in fact, during recent
years have taken a prominent place in pacifism as well as in
imperialism. Men like Schuecking and Quidde and Fried are at least as
well known as men like Treitschke and Bernhardi. Opinion in Germany, as
in every other country, has been various and conflicting. And the
pacific tendencies have been better organized, if not more active,
there than elsewhere, for they have been associated with the huge and
disciplined forces of the Social-Democrats. Indeed, the mass of the
people, left alone, is everywhere pacific. I do not forget the very
important fact that German education, elementary and higher, has been
deliberately directed to inculcate patriotic feeling, that the doctrine
of armed force as the highest manifestation of the State has been
industriously propagated by the authorities, and that the unification
of Germany by force has given to the cult of force a meaning and a
popularity probably unknown in any other country. But in most men, for
good or for evil, the lessons of education can be quickly obliterated
by the experience of life. In particular, the mass of the people
everywhere, face to face with the necessities of existence, knowing
what it is to work and to struggle, to co-operate and to compete, to
suffer and to relieve suffering, though they may be less well-informed
than the instructed classes, are also less liable to obsession by
abstractions. They see little, but they see it straight. And though,
being men, with the long animal inheritance of men behind them, their
passions may be roused by any cry of battle, though they are the
fore-ordained dupes of those who direct the policy of nations, yet it
is not their initiative that originates wars. They do not desire
conquest, they do not trouble about “race” or chatter about the
“survival of the fittest.” It is their own needs, which are also the
vital needs of society, that preoccupy their thoughts; and it is real
goods that direct and inspire their genuine idealism.
We must, then, disabuse ourselves of the notion so naturally
produced by reading, and especially by reading in time of war, that the
German Jingoes are typical of Germany. They are there, they are a
force, they have to be reckoned with. But exactly how great a force?
Exactly how influential on policy? That is a question which I imagine
can only be answered by guesses. Would the reader, for instance,
undertake to estimate the influence during the last fifteen years on
British policy and opinion of the imperialist minority in this country?
No two men, I think, would agree about it. And few men would agree with
themselves from one day or one week to another. We are reduced to
conjecture. But the conjectures of some people are of more value than
those of others, for they are based on a wider converse. I think it
therefore not without importance to recall to the reader the accounts
of the state of opinion in Germany given by well-qualified foreign
observers in the years immediately preceding the war.
[Footnote 1: As I write I come across the following, cited from a
book of songs composed for German combatants under the title “Der
deutsche Zorn”:—
Wir sind die Meister aller Welt
In allen ernsten Dingen,
* * * * *
Was Man als fremd euch hoechlichst preist
Um eurer Einfalt Willen,
Ist deutschen Ursprungs allermeist,
Und traegt nur fremde Huellen.]