New York Times Current History The European War, Vol 1, No. 1 Part 18

By both extremes the woman gets something back out of life. There is only one place where she gets little or nothing back, and that is the north of Germany. France and America aim alike at equality; America by similarity, France by dissimilarity. But North Germany does definitely aim at inequality. The woman stands up with no more irritation than a butler; the man sits down with no more embarra.s.sment than a guest. This is the cool affirmation of inferiority, as in the case of the sabre and the tradesmen. "Thou goest with women; forget not thy whip," said Nietzsche. It will be observed that he does not say "poker," which might come more naturally to the mind of a more common or Christian wife-beater. But, then, a poker is a part of domesticity, and might be used by the wife as well as the husband. In fact, it often is. The sword and the whip are the weapons of a privileged caste.

Pa.s.s from the closest of all differences, that between husband and wife, to the most distant of all differences, that of the remote and unrelated races who have seldom seen each other's faces, and never been tinged with each other's blood. Here we still find the same unvarying Prussian principle. Any European might feel a genuine fear of the Yellow Peril, and many Englishmen, Frenchmen, and Russians have felt and expressed it.

Many might say, and have said, that the heathen Chinee is very heathen indeed; that if he ever advances against us he will trample and torture and utterly destroy, in a way that Eastern people do, but Western people do not. Nor do I doubt the German Emperor's sincerity when he sought to point out to us how abnormal and abominable such a nightmare campaign would be, supposing that it could come.

But now comes the comic irony, which never fails to follow on the attempt of the Prussian to be philosophic. For the Kaiser, after explaining to his troops how important it was to avoid Eastern barbarism, instantly commanded them to become Eastern barbarians. He told them, in so many words, to be Huns, and leave nothing living or standing behind them. In fact, he frankly offered a new army corps of aboriginal Tartars to the Far East, within such time as it may take a bewildered Hanoverian to turn into a Tartar. Any one who has the painful habit of personal thought will perceive here at once the non-reciprocal principle again. Boiled down to its bones of logic, it means simply this: "I am a German and you are a Chinaman. Therefore, I being a German, have a right to be a Chinaman. But you have no right to be a Chinaman, because you are only a Chinaman." This is probably the highest point to which the German culture has risen.

*"The Principle of Being Unprincipled."*

The principle here neglected, which may be called mutuality by those who misunderstand and dislike the word equality, does not offer so clear a distinction between the Prussian and the other peoples as did the first Prussian principle of an infinite and destructive opportunism; or, in other words, the principle of being unprincipled. Nor upon this second can one take up so obvious a position touching the other civilizations or semi-civilizations of the world. Some idea of oath and bond there is in the rudest tribes, in the darkest continents. But it might be maintained, of the more delicate and imaginative element of reciprocity, that a cannibal in Borneo understands it almost as little as a professor in Berlin. A narrow and one-sided seriousness is the fault of barbarians all over the world. This may have been the meaning, for aught I know, of the one eye of the Cyclops; that the barbarian cannot see around things or look at them from two points of view, and thus becomes a blind beast and an eater of men. Certainly there can be no better summary of the savage than this, which, as we have seen, unfits him for the duel. He is the man who cannot love--no, nor even hate--his neighbor as himself.

But this quality in Prussia does have one effect which has reference to the same question of the lower civilizations. It disposes once and for all at least of the civilizing mission of Germany. Evidently the Germans are the last people in the world to be trusted with the task. They are as short-sighted morally as physically. What is their sophism of "necessity" but an inability to imagine tomorrow morning? What is their non-reciprocity but an inability to imagine, not a G.o.d or devil, but merely another man? Are these to judge mankind? Men of two tribes in Africa not only know that they are all men but can understand that they are all black men. In this they are quite seriously in advance of the intellectual Prussian, who cannot be got to see that we are all white men. The ordinary eye is unable to perceive in the Northeast Teuton anything that marks him out especially from the more colorless cla.s.ses of the rest of Aryan mankind. He is simply a white man, with a tendency to the gray or the drab. Yet he will explain in serious official doc.u.ments that the difference between him and us is a difference between "the master race and the inferior race."

*How to Know "The Master Race."*

The collapse of German philosophy always occurs at the beginning rather than the end of an argument, and the difficulty here is that there is no way of testing which is a master race except by asking which is your own race. If you cannot find out, (as is usually the case,) you fall back on the absurd occupation of writing history about prehistoric times. But I suggest quite seriously that if the Germans can give their philosophy to the Hottentots there is no reason why they should not give their sense of superiority to the Hottentots. If they can see such fine shades between the Goth and the Gaul, there is no reason why similar shades should not lift the savage above other savages; why any Ojibway should not discover that he is one tint redder than the Dakotas, or any n.i.g.g.e.r in the Kameruns say he is not so black as he is painted. For this principle of a quite unproved racial supremacy is the last and worst of the refusals of reciprocity. The Prussian calls all men to admire the beauty of his large blue eyes. If they do, it is because they have inferior eyes; if they don't, it is because they have no eyes.

Wherever the most miserable remnant of our race, astray and dried up in deserts or buried forever under the fall of bad civilization, has some feeble memory that men are men, that bargains are bargains, that there are two sides to a question, or even that it takes two to make a quarrel--that remnant has the right to a.s.sist the New Culture, to the knife and club and the splintered stone. For the Prussian begins all his culture by that act which is the destruction of all creative thought and constructive action. He breaks that mirror in the mind in which a man can see the face of his friend or foe.

*IV.*

*Russia Less Despotic Than Prussia*

The German Emperor has reproached this country (England) with allying itself with "barbaric and semi-Oriental power." We have already considered in what sense we use the word barbaric; it is in the sense of one who is hostile to civilization, not one who is insufficient in it.

But when we pa.s.s from the idea of the barbaric to the idea of the Oriental, the case is even more curious. There is nothing particularly Tartar in Russian affairs, except the fact that Russia expelled the Tartars. The Eastern invader occupied and crushed the country for many years; but that is equally true of Greece, of Spain, and even of Austria. If Russia has suffered from the East, she has suffered in order to resist it; and it is rather hard that the very miracle of her escape should make a mystery about her origin. Jonah may or may not have been three days inside a fish; but that does not make him a merman. And in all the other cases of European nations who escaped the monstrous captivity, we do admit the purity and continuity of the European type.

We consider the old Eastern rule as a wound, but not as a stain.

Copper-colored men out of Africa overruled for centuries the religion and patriotism of Spaniards. Yet I have never heard that "Don Quixote"

was an African fable on the lines of "Uncle Remus." I have never heard that the heavy black in the pictures of Velasquez was due to a negro ancestry. In the case of Spain, which is close to us, we can recognize the resurrection of a Christian and cultured nation after its age of bondage. But Russia is rather remote; and those to whom nations are but names in newspapers can really fancy, like Mr. Baring's friend, that all Russian churches are "mosques." Yet the land of Turgenev is not a wilderness of fakirs; and even the fanatical Russian is as proud of being different from the Mongol as the fanatical Spaniard was proud of being different from the Moor.

*"Scratch a Russian."*

The town of Reading, as it exists, offers few opportunities for piracy on the high seas; yet it was the camp of the pirates in Alfred's days. I should think it hard to call the people of Berkshire half Danish merely because they drove out the Danes. In short, some temporary submergence under the savage flood was the fate of many of the most civilized States of Christendom, and it is quite ridiculous to argue that Russia, which wrestled hardest, must have recovered least. Everywhere, doubtless, the East spread a sort of enamel over the conquered countries; but everywhere the enamel cracked. Actual history, in fact, is exactly opposite to the cheap proverb invented against the Muscovite. It is not true to say, "Scratch a Russian and you find a Tartar." In the darkest hour of the barbaric dominion it was truer to say, "Scratch a Tartar and you find a Russian." It was the civilization that survived under all the barbarism. This vital romance of Russia, this revolution against Asia, can be proved in pure fact; not only from the almost superhuman activity of Russia during the struggle, but also (which is much rarer as human history goes) by her quite consistent conduct since. She is the only great nation which has really expelled the Mongol from her country and continued to protest against presence of the Mongol in her continent.

Knowing what he had been in Russia, she knew what he would be in Europe.

In this she pursued a logical line of thought, which was, if anything, too unsympathetic with the energies and religions of the East. Every other country, one may say, has been an ally of the Turk--that is, of the Mongol and the Moslem. The French played them as pieces against Austria; the English warmly supported them under the Palmerston regime; even the young Italians sent troops to the Crimea; and of Russia and her Austrian va.s.sal it is nowadays needless to speak. For good or evil, it is the fact of history that Russia is the only power in Europe that has never supported the Crescent against the Cross.

That doubtless will appear an unimportant matter, but it may become important under certain peculiar conditions. Suppose, for the sake of argument, that there were a powerful Prince in Europe who had gone ostentatiously out of his way to pay reverence to the remains of the Tartar, Mongol, and Moslem left as an outpost in Europe. Suppose there were a Christian Emperor who could not even go to the tomb of the crucified without pausing to congratulate the last and living crucifier.

If there were an Emperor who gave guns and guides and maps and drill instructors to defend the remains of the Mongol in Christendom, what would we say to him? I think at least we might ask him what he meant by his impudence when he talked about supporting a semi-Oriental power.

That we support a semi-Oriental power we deny. That he has supported an entirely Oriental power cannot be denied, no, not even by the man who did it.

_Whom Has Prussia Emanc.i.p.ated?_

But here is to be noted the essential difference between Russia and Prussia; especially by those who use the ordinary liberal arguments against the latter Russia has a policy, which she pursues, if you will, through evil and good; but at least so as to produce good as well as evil. Let it be granted that the policy has made her oppressive to the Finns, the Poles--though the Russian Poles feel far less oppressed than do the Prussian Poles. But it is a mere historic fact, that if Russia has been a despot to some small nations, she has been a deliverer to others. She did, so far as in her lay, emanc.i.p.ate the Servians or the Montenegrins. But whom did Prussia ever emanc.i.p.ate--even by accident? It is, indeed, somewhat extraordinary that in the perpetual permutations of international politics the Hohenzollerns have never gone astray into the path of enlightenment. They have been in alliance with almost everybody off and on; with France, with England, with Austria, with Russia. Can any one candidly say that they have left on any one of these people the faintest impress of progress or liberation? Prussia was the enemy of the French monarchy, but a worse enemy of the French Revolution. Prussia had been an enemy of the Czar, but she was a worse enemy of the Duma.

Prussia totally disregarded Austrian rights; but she is today quite ready to inflict Austrian wrongs. This is the strong particular difference between the one empire and the other. Russia is pursuing certain intelligible and sincere ends, which to her at least are ideals, and for which, therefore, she will make sacrifices and will protect the weak. But the North German soldier is a sort of abstract tyrant; everywhere and always on the side of materialistic tyranny. This Teuton in uniform has been found in strange places; shooting farmers before Saratoga and flogging soldiers in Surrey, hanging n.i.g.g.e.rs in Africa and raping girls in Wicklow, but never, by some mysterious fatality, lending a hand to the freeing of a single city or the independence of one solitary flag. Wherever scorn and prosperous oppression are, there is the Prussian; unconsciously consistent, instinctively restrictive, innocently evil; "following darkness like a dream."

*Disinterested Despotism.*

Suppose we heard of a person (gifted with some longevity) who had helped Alva to persecute Dutch Protestants, then helped Cromwell to persecute Irish Catholics, and then helped Claverhouse to persecute Scotch Puritans--we should find it rather easier to call him a persecutor than to call him a Protestant or a Catholic. Curiously enough, this is actually the position in which the Prussian stands in Europe. No arguments can alter the fact that in three converging and conclusive cases he has been on the side of three distinct rulers of different religions, who had nothing whatever in common except that they were ruling oppressively. In these three Governments, taken separately, one can see something excusable, or at least human. When the Kaiser encouraged the Russian rulers to crush the revolution, the Russian rulers undoubtedly believed they were wrestling with an inferno of atheism and anarchy. A Socialist of the ordinary English kind cried out upon me when I spoke of Stolypin and said he was chiefly known by the halter called "Stolypin's Necktie." As a fact, there were many other things interesting about Stolypin besides his necktie--his policy of peasant proprietorship, his extraordinary personal courage, and certainly none more interesting than that movement in his death agony, when he made the sign of the cross toward the Czar, as the crown and captain of his Christianity. But the Kaiser does not regard the Czar as the captain of Christianity. Far from it. What he supported in Stolypin was the necktie, and nothing but the necktie; the gallows, and not the cross. The Russian ruler did believe that the Orthodox Church was orthodox. The Austrian Archduke did really desire to make the Catholic Church catholic. He did really believe that he was being pro-Catholic in being pro-Austrian. But the Kaiser cannot be pro-Catholic, and, therefore, cannot have been really pro-Austrian; he was simply and solely anti-Servian; nay, even in the cruel and sterile strength of Turkey, any one with imagination can see something of the tragedy, and, therefore, of the tenderness of true belief. The worst that can be said of the Moslems is, as the poet put it, they offered to man the choice of the Koran or the sword. The best that can be said for the German is that he does not care about the Koran, but is satisfied if he can have the sword. And for me, I confess, even the sins of these three other striving empires take on, in comparison, something that is sorrowful and dignified; and I feel they do not deserve that this little Lutheran lounger should patronize all that is evil in them, while ignoring all that is good. He is not Catholic; he is not Orthodox; he is not Mohammedan. He is merely an old gentleman who wishes to share the crime, though he cannot share the creed. He desires to be a persecutor by the pang without the palm. So strongly do all the instincts of the Prussian drive against liberty that he would rather oppress other peoples'

subjects than think of anybody going without the benefits of oppression.

He is a sort of disinterested despot. He is as disinterested as the devil, who is ready to do any one's dirty work.

*The Paradox of Prussia.*

This would seem obviously fantastic were it not supported by solid facts which cannot be explained otherwise. Indeed it would be inconceivable if we were thinking of a whole people, consisting of free and varied individuals. But in Prussia the governing cla.s.s is really a governing cla.s.s, and a very few people are needed to think along these lines to make all the other people act along them. And the paradox of Prussia is this: That while its princes and n.o.bles have no other aim on this earth but to destroy democracy wherever it shows itself, they have contrived to get themselves trusted, not as wardens of the past, but as forerunners of the future. Even they cannot believe that their theory is popular, but they do believe that it is progressive. Here again we find the spiritual chasm between the two monarchies in question. The Russian inst.i.tutions are, in many cases, really left in the rear of the Russian people, and many of the Russian people know it. But the Prussian inst.i.tutions are supposed to be in advance of the Prussian people, and most of the Prussian people believe it. It is thus much easier for the war lords to go everywhere and impose a hopeless slavery upon every one, for they have already imposed a sort of hopeful slavery on their own simple race.

*A Factory of Thumbscrews.*

And when men shall speak to us of the h.o.a.ry iniquities of Russia and of how antiquated is the Russian system we shall answer, "Yes; that is the superiority of Russia." Their inst.i.tutions are part of their history, whether as relics or fossils. Their abuses have really been uses; that is to say, they have been used up. If they have old engines of terror or torment, they may fall to pieces from mere rust, like an old coat of armor. But in the case of the Prussian tyranny, if it be tyranny at all, it is the whole point of its claim that it is not antiquated, but just going to begin, like the showman. Prussia has a whole thriving factory of thumbscrews, a whole humming workshop of wheels and racks, of the newest and neatest pattern, with which to win Europe back to reaction * * * infandum renovare dolorem. And if we wish to test the truth of this, it can be done by the same method which showed us that Russia, if her race or religion could sometimes make her an invader and an oppressor, could also be made an emanc.i.p.ator and a knight errant. In the same way, if the Russian inst.i.tutions are old-fashioned, they honestly exhibit the good as well as the bad that can be found in old-fashioned things. In their police system they have an inequality which is against our ideas of law. But in their commune system they have an equality that is older than law itself. Even when they flogged each other like barbarians, they called each other by their Christian names like children. At their worst, they retained all the best of a rude society. At their best, they are simply good, like good children or good nuns. But in Prussia, all that is best in the civilized machinery is put at the service of all that is worst in the barbaric mind. Here again the Prussian has no accidental merits, none of those lucky survivals, none of those late repentances, which make the patchwork glory of Russia. Here all is sharpened to a point and pointed to a purpose; and that purpose, if words and acts have any meaning at all, is the destruction of liberty throughout the world.

*V.*

*The "Bond of Teutonism"*

In considering the Prussian point of view we have been considering what seems to be mainly a mental limitation--a kind of knot in the brain.

Toward the problem of Slav population, of English colonization, of French armies, and of reinforcements it shows the same strange philosophic sulks. So far as I can follow it, it seems to amount to saying, "It is very wrong that you should be superior to me, because I am superior to you." The spokesman of this system seems to have a curious capacity for concentrating this entanglement or contradiction sometimes into a single paragraph, or even a single sentence. I have already referred to the German Emperor's celebrated suggestion that in order to avert the peril of Hunnishness we should all become Huns. A much stronger instance is his more recent order to his troops touching the war in Northern France. As most people know, his words ran: "It is my royal and imperial command that you concentrate your energies, for the immediate present, upon one single purpose, and that is that you address all your skill and all the valor of my soldiers to exterminate first the treacherous English and to walk over Gen. French's contemptible little army." The rudeness of the remark an Englishman can afford to pa.s.s over. What I am interested in is the mentality, the train of thought that can manage to entangle itself even in so brief a s.p.a.ce.

If French's little army is contemptible it would seem clear that all the skill and valor of the German Army had better not be concentrated on it, but on the larger and less contemptible allies. If all the skill and valor of the German Army are concentrated on it it is not being treated as contemptible. But the Prussian rhetorician had two incompatible sentiments in his mind, and he insisted on saying them both at once. He wanted to think of an English Army as a small thing; but he also wanted to think of an English defeat as a big thing. He wanted to exult, at the same moment, in the utter weakness of the British Nation in their attack and the supreme skill and valor of the Germans in repelling such an attack. Somehow it must be made a common and obvious collapse for England and yet a daring and unexpected triumph for Germany. In trying to express these contradictory conceptions simultaneously he got rather mixed. Therefore he bade Germania fill all her vales and mountains with the dying agonies of this almost invisible earwig, and let the impure blood of this c.o.c.kroach redden the Rhine down to the sea.

*Prof. Harnack's Reproach*.

But it would be unfair to base the criticism on the utterance of any accidental and hereditary Prince; and it is quite equally clear in the case of the philosophers who have been held up to us, even in England, as the very prophets of progress. And in nothing is it shown more sharply than in the curious, confused talk about race, and especially about the Teutonic race. Prof. Harnack and similar people are reproaching us, I understand, for having broken "the bond of Teutonism"--a bond which the Prussians have strictly observed, both in breach and observance. We note it in the open annexation of lands wholly inhabited by negroes, such as Denmark. We note it equally in their instant and joyful recognition of the flaxen hair and light blue eyes of the Turks. But it is still the abstract principle of Prof. Harnack which interests me most, and in following it I have the same complexity of inquiry, but the same simplicity of result. Comparing the professor's concern about "Teutonism" with his unconcern about Belgium, I can only reach the following result: "A man need not keep a promise he has made.

But a man must keep a promise he has not made." There certainly was a treaty binding Britain to Belgium, if it was only a sc.r.a.p of paper. If there was any treaty binding Britain with Teutonism it is, to say the least of it, a lost sc.r.a.p of paper--almost what one might call a sc.r.a.p of waste paper. Here again the pedants under consideration exhibit the illogical perversity that makes the brain reel. There is obligation and there is no obligation; sometimes it appears that Germany and England must keep faith with each other; sometimes that Germany need not keep faith with anybody and anything; sometimes that we, alone among European peoples, are almost ent.i.tled to be Germans; sometimes that besides us Russians and Frenchmen almost rise to a Germanic loveliness of character. But through all there is, hazy but not hypocritical, this sense of some common Teutonism.

Prof. Haeckel, another of the witnesses raised up against us, attained to some celebrity at one time through proving the remarkable resemblance between two different things by printing duplicate pictures of the same thing. Prof. Haeckel's contribution to biology, in this case, was exactly like Prof. Harnack's contribution to ethnology. Prof. Harnack knows what a German is like. When he wants to imagine what an Englishman is like he simply photographs the same German over again. In both cases there is probably sincerity, as well as simplicity. Haeckel was so certain that the species ill.u.s.trated in embryo really are closely related and linked up that it seemed to him a small thing to simplify it by mere repet.i.tion. Harnack is so certain that the German and Englishman are almost alike that he really risks the generalization that they are exactly alike. He photographs, so to speak, the same fair and foolish face twice over, and calls it a remarkable resemblance between cousins.

Thus he can prove the existence of Teutonism just about as conclusively as Haeckel has proved the more tenable proposition of the non-existence of G.o.d.

*Germans and English.*

Now, the German and the Englishman are not in the least alike--except in the sense that neither of them are negroes. They are, in everything good and evil, more unlike than any other two men we can take at random from the great European family. They are opposite from the roots of their history--nay, of their geography. It is an understatement to call Britain insular. Britain is not only an island, but an island slashed by the sea till it nearly splits into three islands, and even the midlands can almost smell the salt. Germany is a powerful, beautiful, and fertile inland country, which can only find the sea by one or two twisted and narrow paths, as people find a subterranean lake. Thus the British Navy is really national because it is natural. It has cohered out of hundreds of accidental adventures of ships and shipmen before Chaucer's time and after it. But the German Navy is an artificial thing, as artificial as a constructed Alp would be in England. William II. has simply copied the British Navy, as Frederick II. copied the French Army, and this j.a.panese or antlike a.s.siduity in imitation is one of the hundred qualities which the Germans have and the English markedly have not. There are other German superiorities which are very much superior. The one or two really jolly things that the Germans have got are precisely the things which the English haven't got, notably a real habit of popular music and of the ancient songs of the people; not merely spreading from the towns or caught from the professionals. In this the Germans rather resemble the Welsh, though heaven knows what becomes of Teutonism if they do. But the difference between the Germans and the English goes deeper than all these signs of it. They differ more than any other two Europeans in the normal posture of the mind.

Above all, they differ in what is the most English of all English traits--that shame which the French may be right in calling "the bad shame," for it is certainly mixed up with pride and suspicion, the upshot of which we call shyness. Even an Englishman's rudeness is often rooted in his being embarra.s.sed. But a German's rudeness is rooted in his never being embarra.s.sed. He eats and makes love noisily. He never feels a speech or a song or a sermon or a large meal to be what the English call "out of place" in particular circ.u.mstances. When Germans are patriotic and religious they have no reactions against patriotism and religion, as have the English and the French. Nay, the mistake of Germany in the modern disaster largely arose from the facts that she thought England was simple, when England is very subtle. She thought that because our politics have become largely financial they had become wholly financial; that because our aristocrats had become pretty cynical they had become entirely corrupt. They could not seize the subtlety by which a rather used-up English gentleman might sell a coronet when he could not sell a fortress; might lower the public standards and yet refuse to lower the flag. In short, the Germans are quite sure that they understand us entirely because they do not understand us at all.

Possibly, if they began to understand us they might hate us even more, but I would rather be hated for some small but real reason than pursued with love on account of all kinds of qualities which I do not possess and which I do not desire. And when the Germans get their first genuine glimpses of what modern England is like they will discover that England has a very broken, belated, and inadequate sense of having an obligation to Europe; but no sort of sense whatever of having any obligation to Teutonism.