Germany and the Next War Part 4

"The chance that once thou hast refused Will never through the centuries recur."

The verdict of history will condemn the statesman who was unable to take the responsibility of a bold decision, and sacrificed the hopes of the future to the present need of peace.

It is obvious that under these circ.u.mstances it is extremely difficult to answer the question whether in any special case conditions exist which justify the determination to make war. The difficulty is all the greater because the historical significance of the act must be considered, and the immediate result is not the final criterion of its justification.

War is not always the final judgment of Heaven. There are successes which are transitory while the national life is reckoned by centuries.

The ultimate verdict can only be obtained by the survey of long epochs.[M]

[Footnote M: Treitschke, "Politik," i., p 2.]

54 The man whose high and responsible lot is to steer the fortunes of a great State must be able to disregard the verdict of his contemporaries; but he must be all the clearer as to the motives of his own policy, and keep before his eyes, with the full weight of the categorical imperative, the teaching of Kant: "Act so that the maxim of thy will can at the same time hold good as a principle of universal legislation." [N]

[Footnote N: Kant, "Kritik der praktischen Vernuft," p. 30.]

He must have a clear conception of the nature and purpose of the State, and grasp this from the highest moral standpoint. He can in no other way settle the rules of his policy and recognize clearly the laws of political morality.

He must also form a clear conception of the special duties to be fulfilled by the nation, the guidance of whose fortunes rests in his hands. He must clearly and definitely formulate these duties as the fixed goal of statesmanship. When he is absolutely clear upon this point he can judge in each particular case what corresponds to the true interests of the State; then only can he act systematically in the definite prospect of smoothing the paths of politics, and securing favourable conditions for the inevitable conflicts; then only, when the hour for combat strikes and the decision to fight faces him, can he rise with a free spirit and a calm breast to that standpoint which Luther once described in blunt, bold language: "It is very true that men write and say often what a curse war is. But they ought to consider how much greater is that curse which is averted by war. Briefly, in the business of war men must not regard the ma.s.sacres, the burnings, the battles, and the marches, etc.--that is what the petty and simple do who only look with the eyes of children at the surgeon, how he cuts off the hand or saws off the leg, but do not see or notice that he does it in order to save the whole body. Thus we must look at the business of war or the sword with the eyes of men, asking, Why these murders and horrors? It will be shown that it is a business, divine in itself, and as needful and necessary to the world as eating or drinking, or any other work."[O]

[Footnote O: Luther, "Whether soldiers can be in a state of salvation."]

Thus in order to decide what paths German policy must take in order to further the interests of the German people, and what possibilities of war are involved, we must first try to estimate the problems of State and of civilization which are to be solved, and discover what political purposes correspond to these problems.

CHAPTER III

A BRIEF SURVEY OF GERMANY'S HISTORICAL DEVELOPMENT

The life of the individual citizen is valuable only when it is consciously and actively employed for the attainment of great ends. The same holds good of nations and States. They are, as it were, personalities in the framework of collective humanity, infinitely various in their endowments and their characteristic qualities, capable of the most different achievements, and serving the most multifarious purposes in the great evolution of human existence.

Such a theory will not be accepted from the standpoint of the materialistic philosophy which prevails among wide circles of our nation to-day.

According to it, all that happens in the world is a necessary consequence of given conditions; free will is only necessity become conscious. It denies the difference between the empiric and the intelligible Ego, which is the basis of the notion of moral freedom.

This philosophy cannot stand before scientific criticism. It seems everywhere arbitrarily restricted by the narrow limits of the insufficient human intelligence. The existence of the universe is opposed to the law of a sufficient cause; infinity and eternity are incomprehensible to our conceptions, which are confined to s.p.a.ce and time.

The essential nature of force and volition remains inexplicable. We recognize only a subjectively qualified phenomenon in the world; the impelling forces and the real nature of things are withdrawn from our understanding. A systematic explanation of the universe is quite impossible from the human standpoint. So much seems clear--although no demonstrable certainty attaches to this theory--that spiritual laws beyond the comprehension of us men govern the world according to a conscious plan of development in the revolving cycles of a perpetual change. Even the gradual evolution of mankind seems ruled by a hidden moral law. At any rate we recognize in the growing spread of civilization and common moral ideas a gradual progress towards purer and higher forms of life.

It is indeed impossible for us to prove design and purpose in every individual case, because our att.i.tude to the universal whole is too limited and anomalous. But within the limitations of our knowledge of things and of the inner necessity of events we can at least try to understand in broad outlines the ways of Providence, which we may also term the principles of development. We shall thus obtain useful guidance for our further investigation and procedure.

The agency and will of Providence are most clearly seen in the history of the growth of species and races, of peoples and States. "What is true," Goethe once said in a letter to Zelter, "can but be raised and supported by its history; what is false only lowered and dissipated by its history."

The formation of peoples and races, the rise and fall of States, the laws which govern the common life, teach us to recognize which forces have a creative, sustaining, and beneficent influence, and which work towards disintegration, and thus produce inevitable downfall. We are here following the working of universal laws, but we must not forget that States are personalities endowed with very different human attributes, with a peculiar and often very marked character, and that these subjective qualities are distinct factors in the development of States as a whole. Impulses and influences exercise a very different effect on the separate national individualities. We must endeavour to grasp history in the spirit of the psychologist rather than of the naturalist. Each nation must be judged from its own standpoint if we wish to learn the general trend of its development. We must study the history of the German people in its connection with that of the other European States, and ask first what paths its development has. .h.i.therto followed, and what guidance the past gives for Our future policy. From the time of their first appearance in history the Germans showed themselves a first-cla.s.s civilized people.

When the Roman Empire broke up before the onslaught of the barbarians there were two main elements which shaped the future of the West, Christianity and the Germans. The Christian teaching preached equal rights for all men and community of goods in an empire of masters and slaves, but formulated the highest moral code, and directed the attention of a race, which only aimed at luxury, to the world beyond the grave as the true goal of existence. It made the value of man as man, and the moral development of personality according to the laws of the individual conscience, the starting-point of all development. It thus gradually transformed the philosophy of the ancient world, whose morality rested solely on the relations with the state. Simultaneously with this, hordes of Germans from the thickly-populated North poured victoriously in broad streams over the Roman Empire and the decaying nations of the Ancient World. These ma.s.ses could not keep their nationality pure and maintain their position as political powers. The States which they founded were short-lived. Even then men recognized how difficult it is for a lower civilization to hold its own against a higher. The Germans were gradually merged in the subject nations. The German element, however, instilled new life into these nations, and offered new opportunities for growth. The stronger the admixture of German blood, the more vigorous and the more capable of civilization did the growing nations appear.

In the meantime powerful opponents sprung up in this newly-formed world.

The Latin race grew up by degrees out of the admixture of the Germans with the Roman world and the nations subdued by them, and separated itself from the Germans, who kept themselves pure on the north of the Alps and in the districts of Scandinavia. At the same time the idea of the Universal Empire, which the Ancient World had embraced, continued to flourish.

In the East the Byzantine Empire lasted until A.D. 1453. In the West, however, the last Roman Emperor had been deposed by Odoacer in 476.

Italy had fallen into the hands of the East Goths and Lombards successively. The Visigoths had established their dominion in Spain, and the Franks and Burgundians in Gaul.

A new empire rose from the latter quarter. Charles the Great, with his powerful hand, extended the Frankish Empire far beyond the boundaries of Gaul. By the subjugation of the Saxons he became lord of the country between the Rhine and the Elbe; he obtained the sovereignty in Italy by the conquest of the Lombards, and finally sought to restore the Western Roman Empire. He was crowned Emperor in Rome in the year 800. His successors clung to this claim; but the Frankish Empire soon fell to pieces. In its part.i.tion the western half formed what afterwards became France, and the East Frankish part of the Empire became the later Germany. While the Germans in the West Frankish Empire, in Italy and Spain, had abandoned their speech and customs, and had gradually amalgamated with the Romans, the inhabitants of the East Frankish Empire, especially the Saxons and their neighbouring tribes, maintained their Germanic characteristics, language, and customs. A powerful German [A] kingdom arose which renewed the claims of Charles the Great to the Western Roman Empire. Otto the Great was the first _German_ King who took this momentous step. It involved him and his successors in a quarrel with the Bishops of Rome, who wished to be not only Heads of the Church, but lords of Italy, and did not hesitate to falsify archives in order to prove their pretended t.i.tle to that country.

[Footnote A: German (Deutsch=diutisk) signifies originally "popular,"

opposed to "foreign"--_e.g._, the Latin Church dialect. It was first used as the name of a people, in the tenth century A.D.]

The Popes made good this right, but they did not stop there. Living in Rome, the sacred seat of the world-empire, and standing at the head of a Church which claimed universality, they, too, laid hold in their own way of the idea of universal imperium. The notion was one of the boldest creations of the human intellect--to found and maintain a world-sovereignty almost wholly by the employment of spiritual powers.

Naturally these Papal pretensions led to feuds with the Empire. The freedom of secular aspirations clashed with the claims of spiritual dominion. In the portentous struggle of the two Powers for the supremacy, a struggle which inflicted heavy losses on the German Empire, the Imperial cause was worsted. It was unable to mould the widely different and too independent subdivisions of the empire into a h.o.m.ogeneous whole, and to crush the selfish particularism of the estates. The last Staufer died on the scaffold at Naples under the axe of Charles of Anjou, who was a va.s.sal of the Church.

The great days of the German-Roman Empire were over. The German power lay on the ground in fragments. A period of almost complete anarchy followed. Dogmatism and lack of patriotic sentiment, those bad characteristics of the German people, contributed to extend this destruction to the economic sphere. The intellectual life of the German people deteriorated equally. At the time when the Imperial power was budding and under the rule of the highly-gifted Staufers, German poetry was pa.s.sing through a first cla.s.sical period. Every German country was ringing with song; the depth of German sentiment found universal expression in ballads and poems, grave or gay, and German idealism inspired the minnesingers. But with the disappearance of the Empire every string was silent, and even the plastic arts could not rise above the coa.r.s.eness and confusion of the political conditions. The material prosperity of the people indeed improved, as affairs at home were better regulated, and developed to an amazing extent; the Hanseatic League bore its flag far and wide over the northern seas, and the great trade-routes, which linked the West and Orient, led from Venice and Genoa through Germany. But the earlier political power was never again attained.

Nevertheless dislike of spiritual despotism still smouldered in the b.r.e.a.s.t.s of that German people, which had submitted to the Papacy, and was destined, once more to blaze up into bright flames, and this time in the spiritual domain. As she grew more and more worldly, the Church had lost much of her influence on men's minds. On the other hand, a refining movement had grown up in humanism, which, supported by the spirit of antiquity, could not fail from its very nature to become antagonistic to the Church. It found enthusiastic response in Germany, and was joined by everyone whose thoughts and hopes were centred in freedom. Ulrich von Hutten's battle-cry, "I have dared the deed," rang loud through the districts of Germany.

Humanism was thus in a sense the precursor of the Reformation, which conceived in the innermost heart of the German people, shook Europe to her foundations. Once more it was the German people which, as formerly in the struggle between the Arian Goths and the Orthodox Church, shed it's heart's blood in a religious war for spiritual liberty, and now for national independence also. No struggle more pregnant with consequences for the development of humanity had been fought out since the Persian wars. In this cause the German people nearly disappeared, and lost all political importance. Large sections of the Empire were abandoned to foreign States. Germany became a desert. But this time the Church did not remain victorious as she did against the Arian Goths and the Staufers. It is true she was not laid prostrate; she still remained a mighty force, and drew new strength from the struggle itself.

Politically the Catholic States, under Spanish leadership, won an undisputed supremacy. But, on the other hand, the right to spiritual freedom was established. This most important element of civilization was retained for humanity in the reformed Churches, and has become ever since the palladium of all progress, though even after the Peace of Westphalia protracted struggles were required to a.s.sert religious freedom.

The States of the Latin race on their side now put forward strong claims to the universal imperium in order to suppress the German ideas of freedom. Spain first, then France: the two soon quarrelled among themselves about the predominance. At the same time, in Germanized England a firs-cla.s.s Protestant power was being developed, and the age of discoveries, which coincided roughly with the end of the Reformation and the Thirty Years' War, opened new and unsuspected paths to human intellect and human energy. Political life also acquired a fresh stimulus. Gradually a broad stream of immigrants poured into the newly-discovered districts of America, the northern part of which fell to the lot of the Germanic and the southern part to that of the Latin race. Thus was laid the foundation of the great colonial empires, and consequently, of world politics. Germany remained excluded from this great movement, since she wasted her forces in ecclesiastical disputes and religious wars. On the other hand, in combination with England, the Low Countries and Austria, which latter had at the same time to repel the inroad of Turks from the East, she successfully curbed the French ambition for sovereignty in a long succession of wars. England by these wars grew to be the first colonial and maritime power in the world.

Germany forfeited large tracts of territory, and lost still more in political power. She broke up into numerous feeble separate States, which were entirely void of any common sympathy with the German cause.

But this very disintegration lent her fresh strength. A centre of Protestant power was established in the North--i.e., Prussia.

After centuries of struggle the Germans had succeeded in driving back the Slavs, who poured in from the East, in wrestling large tracts from them, and in completely Germanizing them. This struggle, like that with the n.i.g.g.ard soil, produced a st.u.r.dy race, conscious of its strength, which extended its power to the coasts of the Baltic, and successfully planted Germanic culture in the far North. The German nation was finally victorious also against Swedes, who disputed the command of the Baltic.

In that war the Great Elector had laid the foundations of a strong political power, which, under his successors, gradually grew into an influential force in Germany. The headship of Protestant Germany devolved more and more on this state, and a counterpoise to Catholic Austria grew up. This latter State had developed out of Germany into an independent great Power, resting its supremacy not only on a German population, but also on Hungarians and Slavs. In the Seven Years' War Prussia broke away from Catholic Austria and the Empire, and confronted France and Russia as an independent Protestant State.

But yet another dark hour was in store for Germany, as she once more slowly struggled upwards. In France the Monarchy has exhausted the resources of the nation for its own selfish ends. The motto of the monarchy, _L'etat c'est moi,_ carried to an extreme, provoked a tremendous revulsion of ideas, which culminated in the stupendous revolution of 1789, and everywhere in Europe, and more specially in Germany, shattered and swept away the obsolete remnants of medievalism.

The German Empire as such disappeared; only fragmentary States survived, among which Prussia alone showed any real power. France once again under Napoleon was fired with the conception of the universal imperium, and bore her victorious eagles to Italy, Egypt, Syria, Germany, and Spain, and even to the inhospitable plains of Russia, which by a gradual political absorption of the Slavonic East, and a slow expansion of power in wars with Poland, Sweden, Turkey, and Prussia, had risen to an important place among the European nations. Austria, which had become more and more a congeries of different nationalities, fell before the mighty Corsican. Prussia, which seemed to have lost all vigour in her dream of peace, collapsed before his onslaught.

But the German spirit emerged with fresh strength from the deepest humiliation. The purest and mightiest storm of fury against the yoke of the oppressor that ever honoured an enslaved nation burst out in the Protestant North. The wars of liberation, with their glowing enthusiasm, won back the possibilities of political existence for Prussia and for Germany, and paved the way for further world-wide historical developments.

While the French people in savage revolt against spiritual and secular despotism had broken their chains and proclaimed their _rights,_ another quite different revolution was working in Prussia--the revolution of _duty_. The a.s.sertion of the rights of the individual leads ultimately to individual irresponsibility and to a repudiation of the State.

Immanuel Kant, the founder of critical philosophy, taught, in opposition to this view, the gospel of moral duty, and Scharnhorst grasped the idea of universal military service. By calling upon each individual to sacrifice property and life for the good of the community, he gave the clearest expression to the idea of the State, and created a sound basis on which the claim to individual rights might rest at the same time Stein laid the foundations of self-employed-government in Prussia.

While measures of the most far-reaching historical importance were thus being adopted in the State on which the future fate of Germany was to depend, and while revolution was being superseded by healthy progress, a German Empire of the first rank, the Empire of intellect, grew up in the domain of art and science, where German character and endeavour found the deepest and fullest expression. A great change had been effected in this land of political narrowness and social sterility since the year 1750. A literature and a science, born in the hearts of the nation, and deeply rooted in the moral teaching of Protestantism, had raised their minds far beyond the boundaries of practical life into the sunlit heights of intellectual liberty, and manifested the power and superiority of the German spirit. "Thus the new poetry and science became for many decades the most effectual bond of union for this dismembered people, and decided the victory of Protestantism in German life." [B]

[Footnote B: Treitschke, "Deutsche Geschichte", i., p. 88.]

Germany was raised to be once more "the home of heresy, since she developed the root-idea of the Reformation into the right of unrestricted and unprejudiced inquiry". [C] Moral obligations, such as no nation had ever yet made the standard of conduct, were laid down in the philosophy of Kant and Fichte, and a lofty idealism inspired the songs of her poets. The intense effect of these spiritual agencies was realized in the outburst of heroic fury in 1813. "Thus our cla.s.sical literature, starting from a different point, reached the same goal as the political work of the Prussian monarchy", [D] and of those men of action who pushed this work forward in the hour of direst ruin.

[Footnote C: _Ibid.,_ i., p. 90.]

[Footnote D: _Ibid._]

The meeting of Napoleon and Goethe, two mighty conquerors, was an event in the world's history. On one side the scourge of G.o.d, the great annihilator of all survivals from the past, the gloomy despot, the last abortion of the revolution--a

"Part of the power that still Produces Good, while still devising Ill";