The thoroughness and efficiency of the Germans are admitted even by hostile critics. In the practical sphere they have excelled in military preparations, in the encouragement of industry, and in the organisation of finance. But they have achieved an even more remarkable success than any of these; for they have so arranged their educational system that it is drilled hardly less admirably than their army.[1] From the primary schools to the universities everything is ordered, so that the plastic mind of youth is forced into a political mould which suits the purposes of government. Patriotism of the pattern approved by the authorities is inculcated directly or indirectly in every class-room. While thought is left ostentatiously free in regard to private morals and religious foundations, the duties of the citizen to the state, the duties of the state to posterity, the relations of Germany to the outside world, are subjects upon which independent speculation is not tolerated.
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Even schoolmasters and professors have their ambitions; but unless they contribute their quota to the support of imperial ideals, their careers are unlikely to prosper. It is not enough that a lecturer should not run counter to state policy; he must actively promote its ends before he can hope to be transferred to a sphere of greater dignity and influence. Pedagogy is a branch of the Civil Service just as much as the Treasury or the Public Health Department. Teachers from the lowest to the highest grades are the stipendiaries of the bureaucracy. If they render useful services they are promoted. If they fail to render useful services they are passed over. If they indulge in dangerous speculations they are sent adrift. Not merely the army, but the whole German nation, is disciplined, during the period of its impressionable youth, with the object of inclining its mind to support state policy through thick and thin.
The schools feed the universities; the universities feed the press, the learned professions, and the higher grades in industry and finance. Private conversation, as well as what is published in newspapers, magazines, and books, bears the impress of the official mint to a degree unthinkable in England or America, Russia or France. Theories of politics are devised by ingenious sophists, exactly as the machinery at Essen is contrived by engineers—for the express purpose of forwarding Prussian policy. History is twisted and distorted in order to prepare the way for imperial ambitions by justifying them in advance.
It is a signal triumph for the thoroughness of German methods that all the thinkers, dreamers, {129} poets, and prophets, with but a few exceptions, should have been commandeered and set to work thinking, dreaming, poetising, and prophesying to the glory of the Kaiser, and his army, and his navy, and his counsellors, and his world policy, and the conquests and expansion which are entailed therein.
MOBILISATION OF INTELLECTUALS
It is somewhat startling, however, to find the intellectuals thus mobilised, and all but unanimous, on the official side; for hitherto in history they have rarely agreed among themselves, and the greater part have usually favoured the Opposition rather than the Government. Nor does this close alliance between learning and the bureaucracy seem altogether satisfactory. For thought loses its fine edge when it is set to cut millstones of state. It loses its fine temper in the red heat of political controversy. By turning utilitarian it ceases to be universal; and what is perhaps even worse, it ceases to be free. It tends more and more to become the mere inventor of things which will sell at a profit; less and less the discoverer of high principles which the gods have hidden out of sight. It would hardly be possible to imagine a more complete reversal of attitude than that which has occurred in Germany between the beginning of the nineteenth century and the present time; and though this change may serve admirably the immediate purposes of the state, it does not augur well for the future of German thought.
The similarities and contrasts of history are interesting to contemplate. In the ferment of thought and action which occurred in France during the generation preceding the battle of Valmy, and that other which has been going on in Germany in the {130} generation preceding the battle of the Marne, there are various likenesses and unlikenesses. In France before the Revolution, as in Germany to-day, a bureaucracy, responsible solely to the monarch, directed policy and controlled administration. But in France this bureaucracy was incompetent, unpractical, and corrupt. Its machinery was clogged with dead matter of every kind, with prejudices, traditions, and statutes, many of which had outlived their original purposes. The Struldbrugs, discovered by Gulliver during his voyages, were a race of men whose mortal souls were incased in immortal bodies. The French monarchy was of this nature, and the soul of it was long since dead. Inefficiency was everywhere apparent; and, as a natural consequence, the whole system had become a butt, at which each brilliant writer in turn levelled his darts of derision and contempt.
In Germany, although the political mechanism is the same, the conditions are diametrically the opposite. The bureaucracy and the monarchy which it supports, have proved themselves highly efficient and adaptive. The arrangement has worked with a marvellous success. It has cherished the material, if not the spiritual, well-being of the people. The wealth-producing and belly-filling activities of the race have been stimulated to an extent never yet attained by any form of government, either popular or despotic. Administration has been honest, thrifty, and singularly free from the usual dull negatives of officialdom and the pedantries of red tape. In all directions industrial prosperity has increased, under the fostering care of the state, by leaps and bounds. Anything more remote from the bankrupt empire of {131} Louis XVI. it would be impossible to conceive. And as a natural consequence, brilliant German writers have for the most part[2] spent their forces of rhetoric and fancy in idealising the grandeur and nobility of an order of things, under which resources, comfort, and luxury have expanded with such amazing strides.
IDEAS OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION
In the case of France the aim of the intellectuals was to pull down existing institutions, in that of Germany it has been to bolster them up, to extend and develop them to their logical conclusions. But the second were no less agents of destruction than the first. Each alike, as a condition of success, required that a new order of moral and political ideas should be set up; each attained a certain measure of success; and the results which followed were those which usually follow, when new wine is poured into old bottles.
The ideas of the French Revolution cast themselves into the mould of republicanism. A picture wholly imaginary and fictitious was drawn of the institutions of Greece and Rome in ancient days. Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity were believed to have been the foundations of these famous states. Patriots on the banks of the Seine conceived themselves to be re-incarnations of Aristides and the Gracchi, of Pericles, of one Brutus or the other—it mattered little which. Political idealism passed rapidly into a kind of religious fervour.
The German masquerade is very different from this, but it is no less a masquerade. What covers the new faith, indeed, is not plumage borrowed from the Greeks and Romans, but habiliments which are supposed to have clad the heroic forms of ancestral Teutons. The student on his way to doctor's degree—the {132} intelligent clerk scanning the high-road to fortune from the eminence of office-stool—dream in their pensive leisure to emulate the heroes of Asgard, to merit and enjoy the glories of Valhalla. But the noble shapes and gorgeous colourings in which the modern young German of honest, sober, and industrious character has chosen to see his destiny prefigured, are no less imaginary and fictitious than those others, with which eloquent notaries'-clerks, and emancipated, unfrocked priests, decked themselves out for the admiration of the Paris mob. In Germany as in France political idealism passed into a kind of religious fervour, which inspired men to a mimicry of old-Wardour-Street shams, and led them to neglect the development of their own true natures.
During quiet times that stream of events, which we are wont to call human progress, is occupied incessantly in throwing up dams, of one sort or another, throughout the world. Tree-trunks and logs, which have been swept down by former floods of conquest and invasion, jam at some convenient rocky angle, as the river falls to its normal level. Against these obstacles the drift and silt of habit, custom, law, convention, prejudice, and tradition slowly collect, settle, and consolidate. An embankment is gradually formed, and the waters are held up behind it ever higher and higher. The tribal pool becomes a pond or nation; and this again, if conditions remain favourable—for so long, that is to say, as there are no more raging and destructive floods,—extends into a lake or inland sea of empire.... "See," cry the optimists, "see what a fine, smooth, silvery sheet of civilisation, culture, wealth, happiness, comfort, and {133} what not besides, where formerly there was but an insignificant torrent brawling in the gorge!" ... But the pessimists, as is their nature, shake their heads, talk anxiously of the weight of waters which are banking up behind, and of the unreliable character of the materials out of which the dam has grown. "Some day," they warn us, "the embankment will burst under the heavy pressure; or, more likely still, some ignorant, heedless, or malicious person will begin to fiddle and tamper with the casual structure; and then what may we expect?"
RECENT ANXIETIES
There has been considerable nervousness of late among rulers of nations as to the soundness of their existing barrages. For the most part, however, they have concerned themselves with internal dangers—with watching propagandists of the socialist persuasion—with keeping these under a kind of benevolent police supervision, and in removing ostentatiously from time to time the more glaring of their alleged grievances. This procedure has been quite as noticeable in the case of autocracies, as in countries which enjoy popular institutions.
Treitschke and Bernhardi—even Nietzsche himself—valued themselves far more highly as builders-up than as pullers-down. It is always so with your inspired inaugurators of change. It was so with Rousseau and those other writers, whose thoughts, fermenting for a generation in the minds of Frenchmen, brought about the Revolution. The intellectuals of the eighteenth century, like those of the nineteenth, aimed at getting rid of a great accumulation of insanitary rubbish. But this was only a troublesome preliminary, to be hurried through with as quickly as possible, in order that the much greater {134} work of construction might proceed upon the cleared site.
Treitschke made a hole in the German dam when he cut an ancient commonplace in two, and tore out the one half of it. Nietzsche turned the hole into a much vaster cavity by pulling out the other half. Bernhardi and the pedantocracy worked lustily at the business, with the result that a great part of the sticks, stones, and mud of tradition are now dancing, rumbling, and boiling famously in the flood. Whether they have injured our dam as well as their own, we are hardly as yet in a position to judge.
The profounder spirit of Nietzsche realised clearly enough the absurdity of supposing that the conflicting beliefs and aspirations of mankind could all be settled and squared in a few bustling decades—that the contradictions, paradoxes, and antinomies of national existence could be written off with a few bold strokes of the sword, and the world started off on the road to perfection, like a brisk debtor who has purged his insolvency in the Bankruptcy Court. But the enthusiasm of Treitschke and Bernhardi made them blind to these considerations. Had not the formula been discovered, which would overcome every obstacle—that stroke of genius, the famous bisection of the commonplace? For private conduct, the Sermon on the Mount; for high statecraft, Machiavelli's Prince! Was ever anything simpler, except perhaps the way of Columbus with the egg?
When we push our examination further, into the means which Germany has been urged by her great thinkers to employ in preparing for this premeditated war, for provoking it when the season should be ripe, {135} and for securing victory and spoils, we are struck more than ever by the gulf which separates the ideas of the German pedantocracy from those of the rest of the world. Nor can we fail to be impressed by the matter-of-fact and businesslike way in which the military and civil powers have set to work to translate those notions into practice.
A POLITICAL PRIESTHOOD
No kind of priesthood has ever yet exercised a great and direct influence upon national policy without producing calamity. And by an ill fate, it has always been the nature of these spiritual guides to clutch at political power whenever it has come within their reach.
Of all classes in the community who are intellectually capable of having ideas upon public affairs, a priesthood—or what is the same thing, a pedantocracy—is undoubtedly the most mischievous, if it succeeds in obtaining power. It matters not a whit whether they thunder forth their edicts and incitements from church pulpits or university chairs, whether they carry their sophistical projects up the back stairs of Catholic King or Lutheran Kaiser, whether, having shaved their heads and assumed vows of celibacy, they dwell in ancient cloisters, or, having taken unto themselves wives and begotten children, they keep house in commonplace villa residences. None of these differences is essential, or much worth considering. The one class is as much a priesthood as the other, and the evils which proceed from the predominance of the one, and the other, are hardly distinguishable.
They stand ostentatiously aloof from the sordid competitions of worldly business. They have forsworn, or at any rate forgone, the ordinary prizes of {136} wealth and position. And for these very reasons they are ill equipped for guiding practical affairs. Their abstinences are fatal impediments, and render them apt to leave human nature out of their reckoning. They are wanting in experience of the difficulties which beset ordinary men, and of the motives which influence them. Knowing less of such matters (for all their book learning) than any other class of articulately-speaking men, they find it by so much the easier to lay down rules and regulations for the government of the world.
To a priesthood, whether ecclesiastical or academic, problems of politics and war present themselves for consideration in an engaging simplicity. They evolve theories of how people live, of how they ought to live; and both sets of theories are mainly cobwebs. There is no place in their philosophy for anything which is illogical or untidy. Ideas of compromise and give-and-take, are abominations in priestly eyes—at any rate when they are engaged in contemplation of worldly affairs. And seeing that the priesthood aspires, nevertheless, to govern and direct a world which is illogical and needs humouring, there is nothing wonderful, if when it has achieved power, it should blunder on disaster in the name of principle, and incite men to cruelties in the name of humanity. 'Clericalism,' said a French statesman, and English statesmen have echoed his words—'Clericalism is the enemy.' And this is right, whether the priesthood be that of Rome or John Calvin, of economic professors expounding Adam Smith in the interests of Manchester, or history professors improving upon Treitschke in the interests of the Hohenzollern dynasty.
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PRIESTS AND LAWYERS
Priests and professors when they meddle in politics are always the same. They sit in their studies or cells, inventing fundamental principles; building thereon great edifices of reasoned or sentimental brickwork which splits in the sun and crumbles in the storm. Throughout the ages, as often as they have left their proper sphere, they have been subject to the same angry enthusiasms and savage obstinacies. Their errors of judgment have been comparable only to their arrogance. Acts of cruelty and treachery, meanness and dishonour,[3] which would revolt the ordinary German or Englishman, commend themselves readily, on grounds of sophistry or logic, to these morbid ascetics, so soon as they begin busying themselves with the direction of public affairs.
It would be unfair to judge any country by its political professors. At the same time, if any country is so foolish as to follow such guides, there is a probability of mischief in national—still more in international—affairs. For they are as innocent as the lawyers themselves, of any knowledge of the real insides of things. They differ of course from the lawyers in many ways. They are ever for making changes for the sake of symmetry; while the man of law is for keeping as he is until the last moment; or at any rate until it is clearly his interest to budge. A priesthood has a burning faith in its own hand-wrought idols; the lawyer on the contrary, does not go readily to the stake, does not catch fire easily, being rather of the nature of asbestos. When lawyers monopolise political power—even when they merely {138} preponderate, as of late years they have seemed to do more and more in all democratic countries, whether of the monarchical or republican type—they invariably destroy by insensible gradations that which is most worth pre............