Germany and the Germans Part 22

In 1909 England had 123,000 tons of warships in the Mediterranean and 427,000 tons in the North Sea.

In 1912 England had 126,000 tons of warships in the Mediterranean and 481,000 tons in the North Sea.

At last accounts England had 50,000 tons of war-ships in the Mediterranean and 500,000 tons in the North Sea.

There has been a steady increase of the navy in Germany. In 1900 the tonnage of war-ships and large cruisers over 5,000 tons was 152,000; in 1911 it was 823,000. The number of heavy guns in 1900 was 52; in 1911 it was 330. The horse-power of engines in 1900 was 160,000; in 1911 it was 1,051,000. The naval crews in 1900 numbered 28,326; in 1911, 57,353; and in 1913 the German naval personnel will consist of 3,394 officers and 69,495 men. Between 1900 and 1911 the tonnage of the British fleet increased from 215,000 to 1,716,000; of the German fleet from 152,000 to 829,000.

In ten years British naval expenditure has increased from $172,500,000 to $222,500,000; in Germany the expenditure has jumped from $47,500,000 to $110,000,000; in America the increase is from $80,000,000 to $132,500,000. Out of these total sums Great Britain spends one third, America one fifth, and Germany one half on new construction.

Germany has a navy league numbering over one million active and honorary members; a periodical, Die Flotte, published by the league with a circulation of over 400,000. This league not only educates but excites the whole nation by a vigorous campaign which never ceases. It takes its members on excursions to seaports to see the ships; it holds exhibitions throughout the country with pictures and lecturers; it supports seamen's homes, and helps to equip boys wishing to enter the navy; it lends its encouragement to the two school-ships which are partly supported from public funds; it sees to it that war-ships are named after provinces and cities, creating a friendly rivalry among them; and lately, out of its surplus funds, it has presented a gun-boat to the nation.

The leading spirit of this organization is Admiral von Tirpitz, at present the German secretary of the navy and probably the most dangerous mischief-maker in Europe. In addition to this work a campaign is waged in the press for the increase of the navy, in which a number of experts are engaged. I have been told by Germans who ought to know, but who deprecate this exciting campaigning, that the press is so largely influenced by Admiral von Tirpitz and his corps of press-agents and writers, that it is even difficult to procure the publication of a protest or a reply. Indeed, were it my habit to go into personal matters, I could offer ample proof of this contention, that the opponents of naval expansion are cleverly shut out of the press altogether.

Wilhelmshafen, the naval station on the North Sea, has been fortified till it is said to be impregnable; the same has been done for Heligoland, and the mouths of the Elbe and the Weser have also been strongly fortified. At Kiel are the naval technical school, an a.r.s.enal, and dry and floating docks, and the ca.n.a.l itself is being widened and deepened to meet the needs of the largest ships of war.

When it is remembered that the beginnings of all this date back only to 1898, when the first navy bill was pa.s.sed through the Reichstag with much difficulty, and only after the Emperor and his ministers had brought every influence to bear upon the members, Germany is certainly to be congratulated upon her success. Nor is she to be blamed for remembering, and regretting, that the two most important harbors used by her trade are Antwerp and Rotterdam, the one in Belgium, the other in Holland.

The Kielerwoche, or Kiel Regatta, has grown from the sailing-matches of a few small yachts into one of the best-managed, most picturesque, and gayest yachting weeks in the world. Indeed, from the stand-point of hospitality, orderliness, imposing array of shipping, and good racing and friendliness to the stranger, I am not sure that it is equalled at either Newport or Cowes. Were I writing merely from my personal experience, I should declare unhesitatingly that it is the most splendid and best-managed picnic on the water that one can attend, and lovers of yachts and yachting should not fail to see it.

This Kielerwoche, too, has, and is intended to have, an influence in teaching the Germans to aid and abet their Emperor and his ministers in making Germany a great sea power.

When a nation for more than a hundred years has been quite comfortably safe from any fear of attack because she has been easily first in commerce, wealth, industry, and in sea power, it comes as a shock, even to a phlegmatic people, to learn that they are being rapidly overhauled commercially, financially, industrially, and as a fighting force on the sea; and all this within a few years.

England with her money subsidies, with her troops, and with her navy has heretofore provided against Continental aggression by the diplomatic philosophy of a balance of power. She has arranged her alliances with Continental powers so that no one of them could become a menace to herself. She did so against the Spain of Charles V, the France of Louis XIV, the France of Napoleon, the Russia of the late Czar, and now against the Germany of William II. The France of the great Napoleon, in attempting to complete the commercial isolation of England by compelling Russia to close her ports to her, buried herself in snow and ice on the way back from Moscow, and delivered herself up completely a little later at Waterloo. That was the nearest to success of any attempt to break through the doctrine of the balance of power.

In the year 800 A. D. the Catholic Church, which took over the Roman supremacy to translate it into a spiritual empire, accepted a German Emperor, Charlemagne, as her man-at-arms. One hundred and fifty years later she accepted still another, Otto I. This partnership was called the Holy Roman Empire. It has been noted, but is still misunderstood, that the difference between the Catholic Church before and after the Reformation was very marked. The Catholic Church claimed to be not only a system of belief but a system of government. Infallibility was to include secular as well as religious matters, and the church strove to rule as a secular emperor and as a spiritual tyrant. To-day Roman Catholicism is a sect, one among many; Roman Catholics themselves would be the last to consent to any temporal universal power.

The Protestants, too, were at first inclined to the methods of Rome.

Luther teaches intolerance, and Calvin burns a heretic and writes in favor of the doctrine: Jure gladii coercendos esse hereticos. The real reformation only came when we had reformed the reformers, but it was that spiritual and political legacy from Rome that the Teuton world, including ourselves, fought to nullify.

There was no successful revolt against this curious spiritual Caesarism until the son of a Saxon miner named Luther married out of monkdom, burnt the Pope's commands on a bonfire, and plunged all Europe first into a peasants' war, followed by a dividing of Europe between a Protestant union and a Catholic league, and then a thirty years' war, which destroyed two thirds of the population of what is now Germany. After three hundred years of disunion and hatreds, Prussia united their country by a cement of blood and iron, and in the last forty years has made out of her the most powerful nation on the continent of Europe.

It is only very lately that any of us have realized what has happened.

So little attention has been paid to the matter that there is no sufficient and worthy history of Germany in English. More than we realize, Germany is a new factor in politics, a new rival in commerce, a new knight in the tournament lists. This accounts, in no small degree, for the uneasiness Germany causes in the world.

Forty years ago Germany was known to a few students as having supplied us with music, mythology, and a certain amount of enchanting literature; scholarship along certain lines; and work in philosophy that a few in America and in England were studying. As a knight in shining armor, demanding a place at the council-board of nations, and ready to resent any pa.s.sing over of her claims to recognition in the discussion and settlement of international politics, she is a newcomer.

One of the chief causes for the restlessness, particularly in England, the heart of the greatest empire in the world, is that this new-comer must be made room for at the table, received with courtesy, and consulted. Another individual has married into the family, and must gradually find her place there. Of all nations in the world, England is the slowest to make new friends and acquaintances, and easily the most awkward in doing so. She is a good friend when you know her, but with the most abominable manners to strangers.

The Englishman, for example, pops into his club to escape the world, not to seek it there. The English club and the English home are primarily for seclusion, not for companionship, and this characteristic alone is wofully hard for the stranger to understand.

To the gregarious German, priding himself upon Gemuthlichkeit, loving reunions, restaurants, his Stammtisch, formal and punctilious in his politeness, unused to the ways of the world, but yet convinced that he is now a great man politically and commercially, the Englishman is not only an enigma but an insult. I am criticising neither. I have received unbounded hospitality and friendliness from both. I have ridden, fought, drunk, travelled, and lived with both, but for that very reason I understand how horribly and continually they rub one another the wrong way.

In the fundamental matter of morals the German looks upon the Englishman as a hypocrite, and the Englishman looks upon the German as rather unpolished and undignified. Berlin is open all night, London closes at half-past twelve. The British Sunday is a gloomy suppression of vitality, touched up here and there with preaching and hymn-singing, and fringed with surrept.i.tious golf; the German Sunday is a national fair, with a blossoming of all kinds of amus.e.m.e.nts, deluged with beer, and attended by whole families as their only relaxation during the week.

The German licenses vice, lotteries, and gambling; the Englishman refuses to recognize the existence of any of the three. The German does not understand the Englishman's point of view in these matters, which is that, though he knows these things to exist, and that he is no better in actual practice than other men, he refuses to accept these as his ideal. He denounces and pa.s.ses judgment upon, and punishes men and women, who go too far in their appreciation and practice of apolausticism as a philosophy of life. He might have run away from danger himself, but he none the less scorns the man who did so. The shipwreck, the fire, the test of moral courage and endurance, may have found him a coward, or weak, or a deserter, but he holds that he must none the less measure the coward, the weakling, and the deserter, not by his own possible weakness if put to the same tests, but by his ideal of a courageous and straightforward Englishman. I agree with him wholly and heartily. If our sympathy is to go out on every occasion, to the man who failed to come up to the mark of n.o.ble manhood, just because we feel that we might under like circ.u.mstances have failed too, then we give up the code of honor altogether, and our ideals droop to the level from which we fight and pray to be preserved.

We pa.s.s judgment upon the coward, upon the failure, upon the man who has not mastered his life and life itself, unhesitatingly. It is hard to do, it looks as though one were without pity and without sympathy.

Not so; it is because we have great sympathy, and I hope unending pity, and a growing charity, and constant willingness to lend a hand; but to condone failure is to commit the selfish and unpardonable cowardice of not judging another that you may not be forced to judge yourself too harshly. That is far from being hypocrisy. Indeed, in these days it is one of the hardest things to do, so fast are we levelling down socially and politically and even morally. It looks like an a.s.sumption of superiority when, G.o.d knows, it is only a timorous attempt on our part not to lose our grip on the ideals that help to keep us out of the dust and the mud. But he who lets others off lightly in order that he may not be thought to have too high a standard himself, or because he fears that he may one day fail himself, such a one is the coward of cowards, the candidate for the lowest place in h.e.l.l; and well he deserves it, for he helps to lower the standard of manhood, and he tarnishes the shield of honor of the whole race. Let them call us hypocrites till they strangle doing so, for when we lower our standards because we fear that we cannot live up to them ourselves, all will be lost. To be mild with other men, because we distrust ourselves, is a poisonous sympathy that rots away the life of him who receives it, and of him who gives it, and ends in a s...o...b..ring charity which must finally protect itself by tyranny and cruelty. Not infrequently in dealing with individuals and with subject nations it is senseless cruelty to be over-kind.

This sneer of Saxon hypocrisy, of "Perfide Albion," is seldom explained to other people by men of our race, and we Americans and Englishmen have taken little pains to make it clear. We should not be surprised, therefore, if we are misunderstood. We have been easily first so long that we have neglected the explanation or the defence of ourselves to others.

The Germans, too, have something of the same indifference. A most sympathetic observer of German manners and customs, and a man for whose honesty and gentleness I have the highest esteem, Pere Didon, remarked of the Germans: "J'ai essaye maintes fois de decouvrir chez l'Allemand une sympathie quelconque pour d'autres nations; je n'y ai pas reussi."

I call attention again to the important point, that it has been difficult to manufacture an all-round German patriotism. As a consequence patriotism in Germany is more than a sentiment, it is a theory, a doctrine, a theme to which statesmen, philosophers and poets, and rulers devote their energies. The German looks upon his nation not only as a people, but as a race, almost as a formal religion; hence perhaps his hatred of the Jew and the Slav, and his difficulties with all foreign peoples within his borders. In order to build up his patriotism the German has been taught systematically to dislike first the Austrians, then the French, now the English; and let not the American suppose that he likes him any better, for he does not. This patriotism, once developed, was drawn on for funds for an army, then for a navy. At the present time there must be some explanation offered, and the explanation is fear of England, dislike of British arrogance. In one of his latest speeches the Kaiser said: "We need this fleet to protect ourselves from arrogance"; that, of course, means, always means, British arrogance.

From the moment a child goes to school, by pictures on the walls, by an indirect teaching of history and geography, he is led on discreetly to find England in Germany's way. At the present writing German school children, and German students, and German recruits are imbued with the idea that Germany's relations with England are in some sort an armistice. This poisonous teaching of patriotism has produced wide-spread enmity of feeling among the innocent, but this enmity has built the navy. And now that in certain quarters it is found desirable to soothe and calm this feeling, it proves to be more difficult to subdue than it was to arouse. The monster that Frankenstein called up devours its own creator. Now that England can no longer be the enemy, because Germany's greatest present and future danger is from the Slav races, there are evidences that the German state is teaching the dog not to bark at England any more.

Germany has not neglected England, but of late she has paid her the wrong kind of attention. Erasmus, the scholar-rapier, as Luther was the hammer, of the Reformation, visits England and writes: "Above all, speak no evil of England to them. They are proud of their country above all nations in the world, as they have good reason to be."

Kant, the German philosopher, on his clock-like rounds in Konigsberg, knew something of England and writes of her: "Die englische Nation, als Volk betrachtet, ist das schatzbarste Ganze von Menschen im Verhaltniss unter einander; aber als Staat gegen fremde Staaten der verderblichste, gewaltsamste, herrschsuchtigste und kriegerregendste von allen."

("The English, as a people, in their relations to one another are a most estimable body of men, but as a nation in their relations with other nations they are of all people the most pernicious, the most violent, the most domineering, and the most strife-provoking.")

Another German, something of a scholar, something of a philosopher, but a wit and a singer, Heine, visited England, and, as he handed a fee to the verger who had shown him around Westminster Abbey, said: "I would willingly give you twice as much if the collection were complete!" To him Napoleon defeated was a greater man than the "starched, stiff" Wellington; and the "potatoes boiled in water and put on the table as G.o.d made them" and the "country with three hundred religions and only one sauce were a constant source of amused annoyance. The German professors and students, who in the early part of the nineteenth century lauded English const.i.tutional liberty to the skies and made a G.o.d of Burke, have soured toward England since.

"What does Germany want?" asked Thiers of the German historian Ranke.

"To destroy the work of Louis XIV," was the reply. Professor Treitschke and his successor in the chair of history at Berlin, Professor Delbruck, have been outspoken in their denunciation of England. Mommsen, Schmoller, Schiemann, Zorn of Bonn, and his colleague there, von Dirksen, Professor Dietrich Schaefer, Professor Adolph Wagner, and many other scholars have been, and are, politicians in Germany, and none of them friendly to England, to France, or to America. Bismarck himself remarked of these gentlemen: "Die Politik ist keine Wissenschaft, wie viele der Herren Professoren sich einbilden, sie ist eben eine Kunst" ("Politics is not a science as many professorial gentlemen fancy; it is an art"); and again: "Die Arbeit des Diplomaten, seine Aufgabe, besteht in dem praktischen Verkehr mit Menschen, in der richtigen Beurtheilung von dem, was andere Leute unter gewissen Umstanden wahrscheinlich thun werden, in der richtigen Erkennung der Absichten anderer; in der richtigen Darstellung der seinigen" ("The work of the diplomat, his chief task, indeed, consists in the practical dealing with men, in his sound judgment of what other people would probably do under certain circ.u.mstances, in his correct interpretation of the intentions and purposes of other people, and in the accurate presentation of his own").

He began his political life in 1862 with the phrase: "Die grossen Fragen konnen durch Reden und Majoritatsbeschlusse nicht entschie den werden, sondern durch Eisen und Blut" ("The great questions cannot be decided by speeches and the decisions of majorities, but by iron and blood").

It is a well-known professor who writes: "Denn die einzige Gefahr, die den Frieden in Europa und damit den Weltfrieden droht, liegt in den krankhaften ubertreibungen des englischen Imperialismus" ("The only danger to the peace of Europe, and that includes the peace of the world, lies in the morbid excesses of British imperialism"). Another quotation from the same pen reads: "So far as other perils to the British Empire are concerned, they are of much the same character, but the empire suffers too from the selfish policy of English business, which, in order to create big business, does not hesitate to interfere with the declared policy of the state." Then follows the statement that English traders have smuggled guns to the Persian Gulf.

Professor Zorn writes: "The possibility that while our Emperor was seeking rest and refreshment in Norwegian waters and enjoying the beauties of the Norwegian landscape, English ships were lying in readiness to annihilate German ships." It is hard to believe that such lunatic lies can come from the pen of a professor in good standing.

"Ohne zu ubertreiben kann man sagen da.s.s heute nur der allerkleinste Teil der deutschen Presse geneigt ist, den Englandern Gerechtigkeit widerfahren zu la.s.sen, bei Behandlung allgemeiner Fragen sich auch einmal auf den englischen Standpunkt der Betrachtung wenigstens zeitweise zu versetzen. England ist fur viele 'der' Feind an sich, und em Feind dem man keine Rucksichten schuldet."

("It is no exaggeration to say that nowadays only the tiniest minority of the German press is inclined to do justice to the English by at least occasionally looking at questions from the British point of view. England is for many the enemy of enemies and an enemy to whom no consideration is due.") Thus writes one of the cooler heads in the Kolnische Zeitung.

Doctor Herbert von Dirksen, of Bonn, writing of the Monroe Doctrine, says: "By what right does America attempt to check the strongest expansion policy of all other nations of the earth?" During the Boer war Germany was showered with post-cards and caricatures of the English. British soldiers with donkey heads marched past Queen Victoria and the Prince of Wales; the venerable Queen Victoria is pictured plucking the tail feathers from an ostrich which she holds across her knees; the three generals, Methuen, Buller, and Gatacre, take off their faces to discover the heads of an a.s.s, a sheep, and a cow; Chamberlain is depicted as the instigator of the war, with his pockets and hands full of African shares; a parade of the stock-exchange volunteers depicts them as all Jews, with the Prince of Wales as a Jew reviewing them; the Prince of Wales is pictured surrounded by vulgar women, who ask, "Say, Fatty, you are not going to South Africa?" to which the Prince replies, "No, I must stay here to take care of the widows and orphans!" English soldiers are depicted in the act of hitting and kicking women and children.

In the war with Denmark in 1864 the Austrian navy met with a disaster at sea. A German publicist even then wrote: "I was grieved at the demonstrations of joy about this in the English Parliament. It was not sympathy with the Danes but petty spite and malice at the defeat of a foreign fleet. But at the same time it is a consolatory proof that the English are afraid of the future German navy." This quotation is interesting as showing how far back the quarrel dates.

It would be merely a question of how much time one cares to devote to scissors and paste to multiply these examples of Germany's journalistic and professorial state of mind. It is unfortunate that some of this writing in the press is done by those who are often in consultation with the Emperor, and on some political subjects his advisers. I have suggested in another chapter that Germany suffers far more from the theoretical and book-learned gentlemen who surround the Emperor than from his indiscretions. In more than one instance his indiscretions were due to their blundering.

Their knowledge of books far surpa.s.ses their knowledge of men, and nothing can be more dangerous to any nation than to be counselled and guided by pedants rather than by men of the world. This projecting a world from the gaseous elements of one's own cranium and dealing with that world, instead of the world that exists, is a danger to everybody concerned.

"Bedauernswert sei es allerdings, da.s.s wir in unserem politischen Leben nicht mit gentlemen zu thun haben, dies sei aber em Begriff der uns uberhaupt abgehe," writes Prince Hohenlohe in his memoirs. ("It is of all things most to be regretted that in our political life we do not have gentlemen to deal with, but this is a conception of which we are totally deficient.")

A daring colonial secretary, speaking in the Reichstag of certain scandals in the German colonies, said bluntly: "A reprehensible caste feeling has grown up in our colonies, the conception of a gentleman being in England different from that in Germany."

When Lord Haldane came to Berlin, on his mission to discover if possible a working basis for more friendly relations between the two countries, his eyes were greeted in the windows of every book-shop with books and pamphlets with such t.i.tles as "Krieg oder Frieden mit England," "Das Perfide Albion," "Deutschland und der Islam," "Ist England kriegsl.u.s.tig," "Deutschland sei Wach," "England's Weltherrschaft und die deutsche Luxusflotte," "John Bull und wir," and a long list of others, all written and advertised to keep alive in the German people a sense of their natural antagonism to England.

During the last year the "Letters of Bergmann" brought up again the controversy, that should have been left to die, over the treatment of the Emperor Friedrich by an English surgeon.

In discussing Senator Lodge's resolution before the United States Senate, on the Monroe Doctrine, the German press spoke of us as "hirnverbrannte Yankees," "bornierte Yankeegehirne" ("crazy Yankees,"

"provincial Yankee intellects"); and the words "Dollarika,"

"Dollarei," and "Dollarman" are further malicious expressions of their envy, frequently used. The Germans are persistently taught that there are neither scholars nor students in America or in England. One worthy writes: "Die Englander lernen nichts. Der Sport la.s.st ihnen keine Zeit dazu. Man ist hinterher auch zu mude."

I am always very glad, when I happen to be in Europe, that I belong to a nation that can afford to take these flings with the greatest good-humor.

As the burly soldier replied when questioned in court as to why he allowed his small wife to beat him: "It pleases her and it don't hurt I."