A German might fairly contend that British criticism of his moral ideas and political system is tainted throughout by ignorance and prejudice, and that all our talk of autocracy, bureaucracy, pedantocracy, military caste, and sham constitutionalism is merely an attempt to avoid the real issue by calling things, which we happen to dislike, by bad names. Political institutions, he might insist, must be judged by their fruits. If this test were applied, Germany in his opinion would have nothing to fear in any comparison.
"We Germans," writes a correspondent, the Freiherr von Hexenküchen,[1] "are not inferior in intelligence or education to any other race. Had this been so, we could never have reached, in so short a period as four decades, the proud position which we now occupy in science, invention, manufacture, commerce, finance, and administration.[2] {150} Consequently, if we are well content to live under the institutions we possess, this cannot be put down either to our want of enterprise or to the dulness of our understandings.
"Our people have already shown that they are willing to fight and die for these very institutions which you Englishmen affect to regard with so much contempt. Possibly your people are equally willing to fight and die for theirs. I do not deny this; but it is not yet proved; it remains to be proved.
"I do not assert that your people are inferior to mine in their readiness to fight and die when they are actually faced with a great national danger. But I do claim that mine are superior to yours in the constancy of their devotion to duty. For a hundred years past—not only in periods of stress and danger, which stirred the national imagination, but equally in times of peace and prosperity, which always tend to encourage the growth of comfort and the love of ease—each succeeding generation has been found willing to train itself in the use of arms, so as to be prepared, if occasion should arise, to defend the Fatherland.
"When the present war broke out was there a firmer loyalty or a more patriotic response to the call to arms among your people or among mine? Will your people fight and suffer more gladly for their 'democratic' ideals than mine will for their Kaiser and Fatherland? ... Surely, upon your own principles no comparison should be possible between the warmth of your devotion and the tepidity of ours.
"Is our system really so reactionary and mechanical as you imagine? In an age which has learned {151} as its special lesson the advantages, in ordinary business affairs of life, of organisation, thoroughness, long views, reticence, and combined effort, guided by a strong central control, is it reaction, or is it progress, to aim at applying the same principles to the greatest, most complex, and infinitely most important of all businesses—that of government itself? Can a nation hope to survive which refuses, in the name of freedom, to submit to control in these respects, if it should be faced by competition with another, which has been wise enough to employ quiet experts instead of loquacious amateurs—any more than a cotton mill could escape bankruptcy were it managed on a system of party government?
"Our civil service, which you are pleased to describe as a Bureaucracy, is distinguished among all others existing at the present time, by the calibre of its members, by its efficiency and honesty, by its poverty, and not less by the honour in which it is held notwithstanding its poverty. You laugh at our love for calling men, and also their wives, by the titles of their various offices—Herr this and Frau that, from the humblest inspector of drains to the Imperial Chancellor himself! And no doubt there is a ludicrous side to this practice. But it marks at least one important thing—that membership of our civil service is regarded as conferring honour. So far, we have succeeded in maintaining public officials of all grades in higher popular respect than men who devote their lives to building up private fortunes, and also to those others who delight and excel in interminable debate.
"You are used to boast, and I daresay rightly {152} of the personal honesty and pecuniary disinterestedness of your politicians; and you assume as a matter of course that your civil servants, with such high standards and examples ever before their eyes, are likewise incorruptible. We invert this order. With us the honour of our civil servants is the chief thing; we assume that our politicians must follow suit. They are probably as upright as your own, thanks partly to tradition, but also to the vigilance of their superiors, the professionals, who carry on the actual business of government. With you the fame of the showy amateur fills the mouths of the public. We, on the contrary, exalt the expert, the man who has been trained to the job he undertakes. In so doing we may be reactionaries and you may be progressives; but the progress of Germany since 1870—a progress in which we are everywhere either already in front of you, or else treading closely on your heels—does not seem to furnish you with a conclusive argument.
"As for what you call our Pedantocracy, meaning thereby our professors and men of letters, it is true that these exercise a great influence upon public opinion. We have always respected learning and thought. It is in the German nature so to do. I admit that our learned ones are rather too much inclined to imagine, that because they are students of theory, they are therefore qualified to engage in practice. They are apt to offer their advice and service officiously, and occasionally in a ridiculous manner. But, if my recollection of the English newspapers be correct, this is no more so with us than with you. There is apparently something in the professorial nature which impels men of this {153} calling to the drafting of manifestoes and the signing of round-robins in times of excitement. They may be officious and absurd, but they are not wholly despicable, since they act thus quite as much from earnestness as from vanity. If our academicians on such occasions mislead more people than your own it is due to their virtues, to the greater zeal and success with which they have won the confidence of their former pupils.[3]
THE MILITARY CASTE
"You are fond of sneering at our Military Caste and attribute to it the most malign influence upon public affairs. But there again, believe me, you exaggerate. Our officers are undoubtedly held in great respect, even in some awe. And the reason is that they are known to be brave, and like those you call the bureaucracy, to have preferred comparative poverty in the public service to the pursuit of riches. To say that they have no influence upon policy would of course be absurd. It is inevitable that in the present state of the world, soldiers will always have great influence in certain departments of public affairs. This must be so in any country {154} which is not plunged in dreams. For it is their business to guarantee national security, and to keep watch over the growth of military strength among the neighbours and rivals of Germany. If the general staff foresees dangers, and can give reasonable grounds for its anticipations, it is clear that the military view must carry weight with the Kaiser and his ministers. And surely there can be no question that this is right.
"The officers of the German Army are a caste, if you like to put it that way. But in every form of government under the sun, unless conceivably in some tiny oriental despotism, the predominance of a certain caste, or the competition between different castes, is absolutely essential to the working of the machinery.
"It is not regrettable in our opinion if a caste, which has considerable weight in public affairs, is a manly one, contemptuous of wealth and sophistry, ready always to risk its own life for the faith which is in it. The influence of a military caste may have its drawbacks; but at any rate it has kept the peace in Germany for not far short of half a century—kept it successfully until, as some people have thought, the professors acquired too large a share of power.
"Is it so certain, moreover, that the lawyer caste, the self-advertising caste, and the financial caste are not all of them a great deal worse, even a great deal more dangerous to peace? Is a country any more likely to be safe, happy, and prosperous under the régime of a talking caste—of windbags resourcefully keeping their bellows full of air, and wheedling the most numerous with transparent {155} falsehoods—than where civil servants of tried wisdom and experience are responsible for carrying on affairs of state, aided at their high task by sober military opinion?[4]
"As for our Kaiser, whom you regard as a crafty and ambitious tyrant, he appears in our view as the incarnation of patriotic duty, burdened though not overwhelmed by care—a lover of peace, so long as peace may be had with honour and safety; but if this may not be, then a stern, though reluctant, drawer of the sword. It is true that the Kaiser's government is in many important respects a purely personal government. His is the ultimate responsibility for high policy. He fulfils the function in our system of that strong central power, without which the most ingeniously constructed organisation is but impotence.
GERMAN SELF-KNOWLEDGE
"The German people are ahead of the English and the Americans in self-knowledge; for they realise that there are many things appertaining to government, which cannot be discussed in the newspapers, or on the platform, any more than the policy and conduct of a great business can be made known in advance to the staff, and to trade competitors all over the world. And so, believing the Kaiser's government to be honest, capable, and devoted to the public weal, the German people trust it without reservation to decide when action shall be taken in a variety of spheres.
"This system of ours which is founded in reason, and in experience of modern conditions, and which {156} is upheld by the unfaltering confidence of a great people, you are wont to condemn as tyrannical and reactionary. But can democracy stand against it?—Democracy infirm of purpose, jealous, grudging, timid, changeable, unthorough, unready, without foresight, obscure in its aims, blundering along in an age of lucidity guided only by a faltering and confused instinct! Given anything like an equal contest, is it conceivable that such an undisciplined chaos can prevail against the Hohenzollern Empire?
"Of late your newspapers have been busily complaining of what they call 'German lies,' 'boastfulness,' and 'vulgar abuse.' They have taunted our government with not daring to trust the people. Our Headquarters bulletins have been vigorously taken to task by the Allies on these and other grounds.
"But all nations will acclaim their victories louder than they will trumpet their defeats. This is in human nature. No official communiqué will ever be a perfect mirror of truth. It will never give the whole picture, but only a part; and by giving only a part it will often mislead. Were we to believe literally what the various governments have hitherto given out as regards their respective advances, the Germans by this time might perhaps have been at Moscow in the East and somewhere about the Azores in the West. But by the same token the Russians should have been on the Rhine and the French and English Allies at Berlin.
"I read your newspapers, and I read our own. I do not think our journalists, though they do their best, can fairly claim to excel yours in the contest {157} of boastfulness and vulgar abuse. And as regards the utterances of responsible public men in our two countries, can you really contend that we Germans are more open to the reproach of vainglorious and undignified speech than the British? Our Kaiser denies having used the words, so often attributed to him in your press, about 'General French's contemptible little army,' and in Germany we believe his denial. But even if he did in fact utter this expression, is it not quite as seemly and restrained as references to 'digging rats out of a hole'—as applied to our gallant navy—or to that later announcement from the same quarter which was recently addressed to the Mayor of Scarborough about 'baby-killers'? Such expressions are regrettable, no doubt, but not of the first importance. They are a matter of temperament. An ill-balanced, or even a very highly-strung nature, will be betrayed into blunders of this sort more readily than the phlegmatic person, or one whose upbringing has been in circles where self-control is the rule of manners.
TRUST IN THE PEOPLE
"But what puzzles us Germans perhaps more than any of your other charges against us is, when you say that our rulers do not trust the people as the British Government does.
"You accuse our War Office of publishing accounts of imaginary victories to revive our drooping confidence, and of concealing actual disasters lest our country should fall into a panic of despondency. There was surely nothing imaginary about the fall of Liège, Namur, Maubeuge, Laon, or La Fere. The engagements before Metz, at Mons, Charleroi, and Amiens, the battles of Lodz and Lyck, were {158} not inconsiderable successes for German arms, or at the very least for German generalship. The victory of Tannenberg was among the greatest in history, reckoning in numbers alone. Our government made no secret of the German retirement—retreat if you prefer the term—from the Marne to the Aisne, or of that other falling back after the first attempt on Warsaw. Naturally they laid less emphasis on reverses than on conquests, but what government has ever acted otherwise? Certainly not the French, or the Russian, or your own. And what actual disasters have we concealed? In what respect, as regards the conduct of this war, have we, the German people, been trusted less than yours?
"I am especially interested, I confess, as a student of British politics, in this matter of 'trusting the people.' All your great writers have led me to believe that here lies the essential difference between your system and ours, and that the great superiority of yours to ours is demonstrated in the confidence which your statesmen never hesitate to place in the wisdom, fortitude, and patriotism of the people. Frankly, I do not understand it. Trust must surely have some esoteric meaning when applied to your populace which foreigners are unable to apprehend. I can discover no other sense in your phrase about 'trusting the people,' than that they are trusted not to find out their politicians. It certainly cannot be believed that you trust your people to hear the truth; for if so why has your government practised so rigorous an economy of this virtue, doling it out very much as we have lately been doing with our wheat and potatoes?
{159}
THE BRITISH PRESS BUREAU
"Has your government not concealed actual disaster—concealed it from their own people, though from no one else; for all the world was on the broad grin? Everybody knew of your misfortune save ............