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 http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924027856347 
 
THE 
 
 PRUSSIAN 
 
 HATH SAID IN 
 HIS HEART 
 
 BY 
 CECIL CHESTERTON 
 
 WITH A PREFACE BY 
 
 GEORGE BERNARD SHAW 
 
 NEW YORK 
 LAURENCE i I GOMME 
 "'1915 
 
Copyright, I91S, by 
 LOUIS H. WETMORE 
 
 VAtl-BAUOU 'CbHMNy 
 AINOHAMTON AND HEW V0KK 
 
To 
 G. K. CHESTERTON 
 
 AHB 
 
 LOUIS H. WETMORE 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 CHAPTEB FAOE 
 
 Peepace by George Bernaed Shaw . v 
 Inteoductoky Letter to American Read- 
 ers ix 
 
 I Introduction 1 
 
 II The Great Diabolist 8 
 
 III The Wars of Anti-Cheist .... 29 
 
 IV The Woeship of the Beast .... 60 
 V The Nemesis 90 
 
 VI 1914 115 
 
 VII The Baebarians 151 
 
 VIII "Thou Shalt not Suffer a "Witch to 
 
 Live" 169 
 
 IX After the War 188 
 
PREFACE 
 By Geoegh Bernard Shaw 
 
 Cecil Chesteeton, like his prodigious brother, 
 is a man to be reckoned with. He is a journalist 
 in the old and serious sense : that is, a man who 
 combines a mastery of the art of letters with a 
 sympathetic insight into human nature, and a 
 power of seizing on its topical manifestations 
 from day to day, and handling them in such a 
 way as to enlist public passion on his side and 
 supply it with the arguments which make up 
 what is called public opinion. Like most who 
 possess this power in the most effective degree, 
 he has cultivated it viva voce as a speaker on 
 various platforms, social, political and religious ; 
 and as his utterances are always either auda- 
 ciously unconventional, or, what is much more 
 dangerous to an orator, reductions to icomplete 
 seriousness of the conventional opinions which 
 every one professes and hardly any one really 
 means anything by, he continually provokes his 
 audience by inhuman intellectual feats, and as 
 continually conciliates it by the most valuable 
 equipment of the bom orator, heartfelt good 
 
 V 
 
vi Preface by George Bernard Shaw 
 
 manners. He has in addition the tremendous 
 advantage, from the point of view of the popular 
 orator and journalist, of being absolutely inde- 
 pendent of party and indifferent to the rewards 
 which party service bring to men of his gifts 
 who are on sale. He has been pursued legally 
 for his fierce invectives against the influence of 
 finance in politics, and has stood his trial, suf- 
 fered the inevitable hostile verdict and its se- 
 quel of a half-hearted attempt to embarrass him 
 with a fine which was either too much or too 
 little, without losing an inch of ground or allow- 
 ing his opponents to gain one. Where he will 
 come out in the end I do not know. At present, 
 he has swallowed all the formulas, from the most 
 extreme and sceptical Atheism and Individual- 
 ism of the mid- Victorian period to the Socialism 
 of the fin de sidcle, only to land, not in cynicism 
 or eclecticism, but in breaking lances for the 
 most extreme dogmas of mediaeval Catholicism 
 and the grossest prejudices of Henry Fielding, 
 not to say of Squire Western. He has Latin 
 brains and a very solid eighteenth century Brit- 
 ish stomach ; and the combination is so rare that 
 he talks and writes as nobody else in England 
 does. The combination plays him tricks some- 
 times, for his British shrewdness and humour 
 
Preface by George Bernard Shaw vii 
 
 enable him to use his intellectual ingenuity to 
 play the very exciting game of making the most 
 imposing cases for all sorts of quite desperate 
 causes; but he is saved from this sort of un- 
 reality by a genuine and ardent republican con- 
 science and sense of national honour which have 
 drawn him further and further into an attack 
 on the corruption of English public life by dan- 
 gerous interests which are half trivially private 
 (mostly dinner invitations) and half utterly in- 
 human, without country or conscience, or any 
 end, except dividend. 
 
 G. B. S. 
 
INTEODUCTOEY LETTEE 
 TO THE AMEEICAN EDITION 
 
 My dear Wetmore, — 
 
 I am naturally flattered to hear that you think 
 this book may be useful on your side of the water. 
 The peculiar conditions of this war and the im- 
 mense issues which it must raise and decide 
 make the opinion of neutral countries a matter 
 of more than ordinary importance, and cer- 
 tainly there is no neutral country whose verdict 
 is being expected with such eagerness and 
 anxiety by all parties as is that of the United 
 States of America. To convince America of our 
 good faith and of the justice of our cause is so 
 essential at this moment that I should be proud 
 indeed, if I thought I could do even a little to- 
 wards accomplishing it. 
 
 As regards the justice of the cause in support 
 of which England is now at war I have little to 
 add to what will be found in the seventh chapter 
 of this book. Indeed it is a subject upon which 
 there is little that one can add to a plain state- 
 ment of the facts, which are not and cannot be 
 contradicted. I think the best proof of the 
 
 ix 
 
X Introductory Letter 
 
 soundness of my thesis on this question is to be 
 found in the fact that in the literature (if I may 
 judge by the samples I have seen) which is being 
 circulated in America in support of the Prussian 
 cause, the question itself is so far as possible 
 studiously avoided. Those who provide such lit- 
 erature are apparently great masters of rhetoric, 
 especially of the rhetoric of abuse. They can call 
 England "the Serpent of the Sea" and France 
 "the Harlot of the World." They can describe 
 the French as "decadent" and the English as 
 "avaricious shopkeepers," the Kussians as "Slav 
 barbarians" and the Japanese as "ugly little 
 Yellow Devils." All this might be true; and 
 yet it would make no difference to the plain 
 question of right or wrong. I happen to hold, 
 and I believe that the American people agree 
 with me (indeed it is the foundation doctrine of 
 their Commonwealth) that, Men as Men, how- 
 ever avaricious or decadent or barbaric or ugly, 
 have Rights. The question at issue is simply 
 this: have the Germanic Empires invaded the 
 rights of their neighbours? It is a question 
 which the apologists of those Empires dare not 
 meet, because in the face of plain facts and pub- 
 lic documents it can be answered in only one 
 way. 
 
Introductory Letter xi 
 
 I might indeed make my case clearer by illus- 
 trations which would bring it home more closely 
 to Americans. I might ask for example what 
 you would have said if, after the Phoenix Park 
 Murders, the English Government had declared, 
 without producing a tittle of proof, that it be- 
 lieved the murderers to be in communication 
 with accomplices in New York; and if, on the 
 strength of our unsupported assertion, we had 
 demanded that the American Government should 
 (1) insert in its public journals an official Pro- 
 English and Anti-Irish pronouncement, (2) dis- 
 band all Irish patriotic organisations in the 
 United States, (3) suppress all Irish Nationalist 
 papers, (4) dismiss from its service certain offi- 
 cers of its State and Army, whom we would sub- 
 sequently name, on the ground that we suspected 
 them of sympathising with the grievances of Ire- 
 land? Suppose we had demanded that you should 
 accept these terms without omission or qualifica- 
 tion within forty-eight hours! I think that 
 within six hours the British Ambassador at 
 Washington would have received his passports 
 and the decks of the American Navy would have 
 been cleared for action. Yet the conduct I have 
 imagined in regard to the English Government 
 is exactly the conduct of the two Germanic Em- 
 
xii Introductory Letter 
 
 pires towards Serbia. It is true that you are a 
 big nation, while Serbia is a small one. But I 
 am much mistaken if the American people will 
 accept the Prussian doctrine that the rights of 
 nationalities depend on size and not on justice. 
 
 Again I might ask how you would like the 
 application to the New World of the Prussian 
 system of international morals as exhibited in 
 Belgium. Suppose for instance that, having 
 secured a guarantee of our neutrality in the 
 event of, a war with, say, Russia or Japan, you 
 had devoted your energies to providing for 
 the defence of your Pacific coast and, relying on 
 our word, had left your Canadian frontier uri- 
 guarded? Suppose that your enemy, acting on 
 the Prussian precedent, asked for a free passage 
 for his troops through Canada, threatening dev- 
 astation and outrage if the demand were re- 
 fused; and suppose that the Canadians, warned 
 by the fate of the unhappy Belgians, submitted? 
 I think you would feel such treachery to be suf- 
 ficiently abominable. Yet such a thing might 
 happen if the Prussian doctrine were to win in 
 this war, and the wrongs of Belgium were to go 
 unavenged, — which, please God, they shall not. 
 
 Finally, need I ask you whether if the German 
 Empire were to emerge victorious, with no rival 
 
Introductory Letter xiii 
 
 left on land or sea, and hungry for new con- 
 quests, especially colonial conquests, what you 
 think would become of the Monroe Doctrine? 
 
 But the special purpose of this book is not so 
 much to demonstrate the crime of Prussia 
 (which is indeed glaringly obvious) as to ex- 
 plain it; and here again I am hopeful that it 
 may be of some slight use in helping Americans 
 to understand the European situation. It seems 
 clear that at present the sympathy of America, 
 is, as might have been expected, overwhelmingly 
 on the side of the Allies ; but a dangerous point 
 may be reached whenever the victory of the 
 Allies shall be more decidedly affirmed. Not a 
 few Americans, who see that we could not with- 
 out disaster and dishonour have refrained from 
 going to war, may yet feel that when once we 
 have fairly beaten our enemies we ought to treat 
 them with magnanimity, and so bring the war 
 to a close at the earliest possible moment. As 
 regards the German people I entirely agree. It 
 will be found in these pages that I have recog- 
 nised fully the importance and necessary per- 
 manence of their contribution to European civili- 
 sation. But I have written this book in vain if 
 I have not shown that the Allies cannot safely 
 sheathe the sword until the military power of 
 
xiv Introductory Letter 
 
 Prussia and all that it stands for have been ut- 
 terly obliterated. 
 
 Your own Lincoln always insisted on the view 
 that Slave States and Free States could not per- 
 manently exist side by side in your Common- 
 wealth; that ultimately either the institution of 
 Slavery must become the universal foundation 
 of that Commonwealth or it must perish. On 
 exactly the same principle, it is the whole object 
 of this book to show that the existence of the 
 comity of European nations is inconsistent 
 with the continued presence of a strong military 
 power acting upon the moral or rather anti- 
 moral assumptions of Prussia. Either all 
 Europe, and perhaps ultimately all the world, 
 must become Prussianised and adopt the Prus- 
 sian standpoint, or Prussia, as a power, must 
 be destroyed. 
 
 And in this connection there is a special ap- 
 propriateness in appealing to the American Re- 
 public ; for that Eepublic is in a curious way at 
 once the antithesis and the counterpart of the 
 Kingdom of Prussia. 
 
 As I have pointed out in the first chapter of 
 this book the historic nations of Europe are of 
 complex growth and inherit elements from many 
 traditions, Pagan and Christian, Royalist and 
 
Introductory Letter xv 
 
 Republican. Hence it is generally impossible 
 to reduce their policy to a single formula. But 
 there are in the world two nations which came 
 into effective existence almost contemporaneously, 
 and in each case by a kind of creative act. The 
 one is the United States; the other is Prussia. 
 
 Your people are of mixed blood and various 
 racial type. The foundiation of your unity is a 
 creed : the creed set out in the Declaration of In- 
 dependence. That the natural equality of man 
 is self-evident, and that all men have an equal 
 right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happi- 
 ness: you were the first to set out these high 
 dogmas (always implicit in Christian civilisa- 
 tion) in luminous and imperishable words, and 
 you founded your new Commonwealth upon 
 them, before France took fire at them, and by 
 her armies carried them victoriously through 
 Europe. They made America a nation, and you 
 cannot deny them without denying your nation- 
 hood. 
 
 Well, Prussia also has a creed, which she holds 
 and acts upon with equal certitude and consist- 
 ency. It is the precise opposite of yours. What 
 appears self-evident to the Prussian professor is 
 that all men are not naturally equal, and that 
 the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happi- 
 
xvi Introductory Letter 
 
 ness belongs only to the strong or the "cultured," 
 to Prussians or to Super-men. That is the 
 creed, now revealed in all its naked infamy, 
 against which we and our Allies are fighting. 
 If we fail, you will have to take up the fight. 
 
 Unless, indeed, the Declaration of Independ- 
 ence is also a scrap of paper! 
 
 Yours sincerely, 
 
 Cecil Chesterton 
 
 LoNDOiT, January, 1915. 
 
THE PRUSSIAN HATH SAID 
 IN HIS HEART 
 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 INTEODUCTION 
 
 It is the principal object of this book to present 
 a certain view, which the author holds to be the 
 true view, of the war in which this country is 
 now engaged, to show that war in a certain per- 
 spective, as, I think, history will see it. For 
 that purpose it is necessary to bring into sharp 
 relief the factor which made war inevitable. 
 That factor was, according to the view here taken, 
 the political and military power of Prussia, the 
 character of the Prussian monarchy, and the 
 spirit of those who as representing Prussian 
 ideas directed the policy of the German Empire. 
 Prussia as it existed before the war, was incom- 
 patible with a civilised and Christian Europe. 
 Sooner or later the one had to be crushed, if the 
 other were not to be destroyed or (what would 
 be worse) corrupted. That is my thesis. 
 
2 The Prussian Hath Said in His Heart 
 
 To that thesis there is a very practical corol- 
 lary ; and it is for the sake of that corollary that 
 I have written this book at this time. 
 
 If the thesis were merely theoretic and his- 
 torical it might be well to suspend its demonstra- 
 tion until the war itself had become a matter of 
 history, and it could be reviewed, perhaps more 
 impartially, certainly with a greater wealth of 
 material. But the question is not merely theo- 
 retic ; it concerns urgent matters of public policy. 
 
 So long, of course, as the issue is doubtful, the 
 main object of us all must be simply to make sure 
 of winning, but at any time now a succession of 
 victories gained by the Allies over the two Ger- 
 manic Empires may bring the question of the 
 settlement which is to follow into the immediate 
 sphere of discussion. In the last chapter of this 
 book I draw attention to the powerful forces 
 which are now working secretly, and may soon 
 be working openly, in favour of a premature 
 peace, such as would sacrifice the fruits of victory 
 and leave Europe still under the menace which 
 has been its nightmare for forty years. Here I 
 will only point out that the question of the terms 
 on which peace may safely and satisfactorily be 
 made must depend upon the view we take of the 
 causes of the war and the character of the enemy. 
 
Introduction 3 
 
 It has been loosely and rather sentimentally 
 said that we are not engaged in a war against 
 the German people. That statement contains a 
 truth and a falsehood. 
 
 It is quite true that the varied peoples inhabit- 
 ing the German Empire did not make this war, 
 and would not, if left to their own tastes and 
 traditions, have made it. It is true that these 
 peoples have already suffered greatly from the 
 supremacy of Prussia, and would ultimately suf- 
 fer more than any other Europeans by a victory 
 which would make Prussia all-powerful. It is 
 true that they will, in the same sense, be gainers 
 by the victory of the Allies. 
 
 At the same time it is a very insufficient theory 
 which would attribute the war solely to the wick- 
 edness or madness of an individual man or even 
 of a group of men. Projects for sending the 
 present German Emperor to St. Helena on the 
 strength of a ludicrous comparison with Napoleon 
 (with whom William II has about as much in 
 common as with St. Francis of Assisi) will not 
 meet the case. I do not mean that Europe should 
 not inflict fitting punishment on the man or men 
 directly and officially responsible for the war and 
 its conduct. I hold strongly that it should. 
 But I do mean that you will get the whole pic- 
 
4 The Prussian Hath Said in His Heart 
 
 ture wrong if you see merely the wicked Kaiser 
 as its central figure. To take an analogy, if in a 
 certain town there is a quite extraordinary prev- 
 alence of crime you will not get to the bottom of 
 the problem by merely repeating that the crimes 
 were committed by criminals, and that the crim- 
 inals are responsible and ought to be punished. 
 Of course they are responsible. Of course they 
 ought to be punished. But what you want to 
 know is why the criminals are so numerous and 
 have so free a hand in that particular town. 
 And the repetition of the above truisms (though 
 very necessary if they are disputed) will not 
 help you to find out. 
 
 The thing the Allies are really fighting against 
 is a spirit, a tradition, a creed. That spirit and 
 that creed have always directed the policy of 
 Prussia. They now direct the policy of Germany. 
 In so far as the Emperor represents them we are 
 at war with the Emperor. In so far as the gov- 
 erning class of Prussia represents them we are 
 at war with the governing class of Prussia. In so 
 far as the German peoples accept them and are 
 prepared to fight for them we are at war with! 
 the German peoples. 
 
 In a word this war is at bottom a religious 
 war. The thing which has defied Europe and 
 
Introduction 5 
 
 has challenged Europe in arms is not a man or 
 a class or a nation or an Empire — ^but a religion. 
 And it is that religion which Europe, if it is to 
 save itself, must first defeat and then destroy. 
 
 To the spirit and creed of which I speak many 
 names have been given. It is sometimes spoken 
 of as "Militarism" ; but that word is not only in- 
 adequate but has been so misused in the past, 
 being continually applied to that reverence for 
 arms which is part of the very stuff of Christen- 
 dom, and again to those reasonable precautions 
 which a free nation will always take to protect 
 its interests and its honour, that it can only mis- 
 lead. Besides, the possession of a huge army 
 and the subjection of the civil population by 
 means of that army, though a necessary part of 
 the Prussian system, is not the root of that sys- 
 tem. Its root, as is the case with all human 
 creations, will be found in a philosophy. 
 
 That philosophy is Atheist. Since the ex- 
 pression may easily be misunderstood, I will 
 at once proceed to explain the sense in which I 
 use it. 
 
 In the present confusion there are many to 
 whom the dogmas of religion present certain 
 speculative diflficulties which they do not feel able 
 to solve. Some of these call themselves Atheists. 
 
6 The Prussian Hath Said in His Heart 
 
 But ninety-nine out of every hundred of such, 
 men in England, France or America, accept as 
 fully as any Christian the dogmatic assertion of 
 moral responsibility, of the validity of the dis- 
 tinction between right and wrong, of a purely 
 ethical (that is mystical) test to which all hu- 
 man action must be brought. Huxley did so 
 when he said that it were better for mankind to 
 perish than to say "Evil be thou my good." 
 Many when arguing against the existence of a 
 God, will appeal to the sense of justice or of 
 compassion, asking how God could permit this 
 or that wrong to endure or this or that suffering 
 to be inflicted. Such men are in truth appeal- 
 ing to God ; for Justice and Mercy are attributes 
 of God, and their claim to unchallengeable au- 
 thority rests on their being so. The professed 
 Atheist may not perceive this; but, for us, the 
 fact remains that in bringing all human things 
 to the test of justice he is really admitting jus- 
 tice to be super-human and implying a super- 
 human judge. 
 
 The real Atheist is a man without God ; not a 
 man who cannot satisfy himself as to the intel- 
 lectual proposition that there is a God, but a 
 man for whom God does not exist, for whom 
 there is no Eighteous Judge of Creation whose 
 
Introduction 7 
 
 judgments are consciously or unconsciously ac- 
 cepted, for whom tlie only test of human action 
 is material success. Such a man may not pro- 
 fess Atheism, He may even personify the mate- 
 rial forces of the Universe, of which alone he is 
 conscious and in which alone he believes, and 
 call them "God." This, one may guess, is what 
 the German Emperor does, and his extraordi- 
 nary speeches are quite explicable when so in- 
 terpreted. It is certainly what is done by those 
 Prussian theologians who still cling to a profes- 
 sion of Theism and even of what they call 
 "Christianity," but whose Pantheism is simply 
 the Materialism of Professor Haeckel of Jena 
 turned inside out. These men are none the less 
 Atheist in their fundamental philosophy, and the 
 State which has been inspired by the type of 
 thinking they represent is Atheist in practice and 
 in morals. 
 
 The Fool of Holy Scripture, it should be re- 
 membered, was he who said, not in Hyde Park, 
 but in his heart that there was no God. That 
 Fool has directed the public policy of Prussia 
 for more than a hundred and fifty years. There 
 has often seemed not a little of wisdom in his 
 folly, but as sure as God lives and judges the 
 earth, a Fool he was and a Fool he is to-day. 
 
CHAPTEE II 
 
 THE GREAT DIABOLIST 
 
 The difference between Prussia and the other 
 great nations of Europe can best be understood 
 if we consider her as the masterpiece of a single 
 creative artist. England and France — and, for 
 the matter of that, Russia also — are like those 
 great Christian Cathedrals which the Prussian 
 so loves to destroy. They are the creation of 
 ages, and every age has left its mark upon their 
 structure. As in sudh a Cathedral you will find 
 Eenaissance work superimposed on the Gothic 
 and behind that the Norman or Eomanesque, and 
 perhaps in the foundations the Eoman brick, so 
 into the making of England or of Prance have 
 entered the Eoman order and arms, and the 
 gigantic miracle of the Faith, and the energy of 
 the Crusades, and. the high civilisation of the 
 Middle Ages, and. the rediscovery of Antiquity, 
 and the religious wars of Catholic and Protes- 
 tant, and the Eevolntion, and the new flame of 
 intense Nationality, which it kindled in friends 
 
 8 
 
The Great Diaholist 9 
 
 and foes. And besides their common inherit- 
 ance there has gone to the making of each, the 
 special work of many great men, remembered 
 still or long forgotten, warriors, saints, law-giv- 
 ers, poets and orators. But Prussia, as we know 
 her, was the work of one man. What she was 
 when he died with all his work accomplished, 
 that she is to-day. She has added much to her 
 territory, much to her wealth, much to her mili- 
 tary power, but not a penny to her spiritual 
 treasury or an inch to her spiritual stature. 
 Many able men have been in her service since 
 that time, but one man of genius planned her 
 foundations and built her walls, and to this day 
 she bears stamped irrevocably upon her the im- 
 press of his powerful and evil mind. 
 
 That man was Frederick II, called — and justly 
 called — the Great. 
 
 Frederick was born in 1712, the eldest son of 
 Frederick William I, King of Prussia. His 
 father, the collector of gigantic soldiers who 
 were never allowed to fight, was a man whose 
 whole mind and character were coloured by mad- 
 ness, and perhaps he bequeathed to his son an 
 insane taint, which, indeed, broke out more than 
 once in the HohenzoUern dynasty. Anyhow, it 
 is fair to the son to remember that, apart from 
 
10 The Prussian Hath Said in His Heart 
 
 any question of heredity, his education was cal- 
 culated to give his temperament a horrible twist. 
 His father entertained for him a hatred which, 
 like all the old lunatic's passions, passed the 
 bounds of reason, so that he was used with a 
 frantic cruelty which on more than one occasion 
 only just stopped short of murder. The young 
 Frederick emerged from a childhood of unspeak- 
 able misery able, energetic, capable of enormous 
 industry, keenly interested in philosophy and 
 literature, but with something unnatural and 
 unsound in his mind or perhaps, rather, in his 
 soul. As his character unfolded this unsound- 
 ness develops into something more horrible than 
 his father's wildest dementia. He seemed to 
 hunger and thirst after iniquity as saints hun- 
 ger and thirst after God. 
 
 The wickedness of Frederick is a thing that 
 stands quite by itself, and must not be confused 
 with the crimes which have stained the record of 
 nearly every great warrior and statesman of his- 
 tory. There has been a tendency of late, espe- 
 cially in Germany, to set up Napoleon as a 
 "Superman," or, as we should say, "Satanist." 
 But in truth such mystical deviltries were alto- 
 gether alien to the lucid Latin brain and, in the 
 main, decent human instincts of the great sol- 
 
The Great Diabolist 11 
 
 dier of the Revolution. Doubtful, or indifferent, 
 like nearly all his contemporaries, in the matter 
 of religion, Napoleon took ordinary Christian 
 morals for granted, like other men, though like 
 other men, he often violated them. When he had 
 been hurried into an unjustifiable act he either 
 expressed remorse for it or made excuses for it, 
 and his excuses (as in the case of the Due d'Bng- 
 hein) had no reference to any "Master Moral- 
 ity," but were the excuses that men ordinarily 
 make for such acts, — grave peril, urgent public 
 necessity, moral certitude that he was wronged 
 and the victim guilty. 
 
 From Frederick you will hear nothing either 
 of penitence or of self-justification. He de- 
 lighted in his crimes, loved to taste and exhibit 
 their criminality, to taunt the God he denied 
 with their success. When he hacked a living 
 nation to pieces he did so not doubtfully or re- 
 luctantly as did the other two parties to the 
 crime, but with joy in his heart and jests on his 
 lips. "The Powers," he said, "might now com- 
 municate and partake of the Eucharistic Body 
 of Poland." Nor does anything in the transac- 
 tion appear to have pleased him more than the 
 knowledge that he was forcing a good woman to 
 act against her conscience. "I wonder," he said 
 
12 The Prussian Hath Said in His Heart • 
 
 (and you can hear the horrible chuckle), "how 
 that old woman has settled matters with her con- 
 fessor?" His own share in the infamous spoil 
 was perhaps less to him than the thought that by 
 making her an accomplice in his sin he was 
 wounding the good heart and outraging the 
 Christian conscience of Maria Theresa. It was 
 as grateful to him as to his Master. 
 
 It should not be forgotten either, though the 
 matter need only be glanced at, that in that de- 
 partment of human life, which is perhaps, after 
 a man's religion, the most fundamental and 
 formative, Frederick suffered what is ever the 
 mark of the Diabolist as contrasted with the 
 merely self-indulgent sinner — the mark of per- 
 version. 
 
 In the Ages of Faith a simple explanation of 
 Frederick's character and career would probably 
 have found general acceptance. It would have 
 been said that he had sold his soul to the Devil. 
 And it may be that such a way of putting it 
 would have been as lucid and satisfactory a 
 statement of the truth as could have been found. 
 For such deliberate choice of evil rather than 
 good seems to have been what the men of the 
 Middle Ages really meant by the S3,le of the soul, 
 and such worldly success as Frederick undoubt- 
 
The Great Diabolist 13 
 
 edly achieved was generally considered as its 
 typical reward. But the age in which Frederick 
 was bom was very far from being an Age of 
 Faith. It was the age in which belief in the 
 supernatural had sunk to the lowest ebb that it 
 has ever reached since the Conversion of the 
 West. 
 
 The immense importance of this fact, its effect 
 upon Frederick's fortunes and on the fate of his 
 life-work will appear presently. At the moment 
 we are concerned with its effect on himself. 
 While Frederick was still a boy the assault upon 
 the Christian faith, made for the most part in 
 perfect sincerity and from honourable motives, 
 by the great French philosophers was produc- 
 ing deadly effect. Frederick, whose early 
 teachers and companions were Frenchmen, who 
 read, wrote, spoke and thought in French — 
 though in bad French — ^immediately came under 
 its influence. He was soon the friend and cor- 
 respondent of Voltaire, the acknowledged chief 
 of the new sect. 
 
 But between him and his masters there was a 
 marked distinction. They were for the most 
 part Deists. Even those few who denied God 
 respected the fundamental axioms of morals. 
 Indeed a constant appeal to these axioms was a 
 
14 The Prussian Hath Said in His Heart 
 
 chief part of their campaign against the Ohurch. 
 Frederick was an Atheist, and though in his 
 youth literary ambition and affectation led him 
 to write a stilted French essay on philanthropy 
 and the duties of rulers in imitation of his fav- 
 ourite models, it soon became apparent that his 
 Atheism did not stop at any merely metaphysical 
 speculation. His strong and lucid mind spanned 
 the whole gulf between the eighteenth and twen- 
 tieth centuries. It pushed him past the Deism 
 of Voltaire, past the Agnosticism of Huxley. 
 His intellectual courage confronted the final and 
 tremendous question which Huxley faced but did 
 not answer in his last and greatest essay. He 
 boldly and even gladly gave the answer which 
 Huxley refused to give. He saw that the denial 
 of God meant ultimately the denial of Right. 
 And he welcomed the solution. 
 
 Frederick, let it be understood, was perfectly 
 sincere. In minor matters of assumed culture 
 he had abundant affectations. But his Atheism 
 was no affectation. It was a conviction as solid 
 as a rock. And upon that rock he would build 
 his State, and the gates of Heaven should not 
 prevail against it. 
 
 But how was a State to be founded on the 
 
The Great Diabolist 15 
 
 Denial of Eight? To any one who has tried to 
 think out what a State is and why it exists the 
 problem will appear a pretty formidable one; 
 for it is precisely on the Assertion of Right that 
 all States rest their claim to authority. Every 
 GTovernment, whether its form be democratic, 
 oligarchic or despotic, claims the obedience of 
 its subjects on the ground that it represents Jus- 
 tice, as the nation conceives it, that it bears the 
 sword for the punishment of evil-doers and the 
 encouragement of them that do well. And as 
 that claim is the basis of all government, so the 
 national assent to that claim is the basis of all 
 civil obedience. But how is a State whose first 
 principle is the denial of all divine and human 
 rights to obtain such obedience? 
 
 It is obvious enough that a Government which 
 cannot claim to repose on Eight without deny- 
 ing its own first principle must, if it is to exist 
 at all, repose on Force; and the doctrine that 
 Government is based on Force, a doctrine which 
 no tyrant of older times would ever have ven- 
 tured to whisper, has from the beginning been 
 part of the Prussian creed and has spread from 
 Prussia even to this country. But, even so, the 
 problem is not solved, for how is the ruler to 
 
16 The Prussian Hath Said in His Heari^ 
 
 obtain the force necessary to coerce his subjects 
 into obedience, since he himself cannot be physi- 
 cally stronger than all of them together? 
 
 Frederick found the answer in that great in- 
 strument which his father had in part created — 
 rather as a mad hobby than for any definite pur- 
 pose — but which his own genius made the thing 
 it ultimately became, and on which the whole 
 fabric of Prussian rule still rests — the Prussian 
 army. 
 
 Frederick knew that a body of men, armed, 
 equipped and well-disciplined can keep down a 
 much larger body of unarmed and undisciplined 
 populace, especially if that populace is not very 
 courageous, lacks initiative and the power of 
 voluntary self-organisation, and has no strong 
 and vivid tradition of freedom. For the main- 
 tenance of obedience in the army itself — at that 
 time a professional or mercenary force drawn 
 from the poorest part of the population — he re- 
 lied upon Terror. The cruelty of the punish- 
 ments inflicted on his soldiers was unexampled 
 even in the eighteenth century when all military 
 discipline was at its harshest. Sentences of 
 many hundred lashes were freely given, and a 
 military flogging was so horrible a business that 
 soldiers sentenced to undergo it constantly 
 
The Great Diabolist 17 
 
 pleaded with evident sincerity to be shot instead. 
 When Frederick was the ally of England he 
 could not venture to allow Englishmen who were 
 anxious to accompany his army to do so, lest 
 they should see by what means Prussian disci- 
 pline was maintained. In fact the whole aim of 
 that discipline was, as it is to-day, to make the 
 soldier more frightened of his ofiflcer than of any 
 possible adversary. 
 
 It need not be denied that there was much in 
 Frederick's administration which has been 
 highly praised, and which to some extent de- 
 serves the praise it has received. But all his 
 statesmanship, good or bad in itself, can be 
 related to his basic political creed. Thus he has 
 been much commended for the freedom he gave 
 to discussion and to the expression of opinion. 
 But it should be remembered that Governments 
 which know their power to rest ultimately upon 
 opinion will always feel nervous and some- 
 times grow panic-stricken when opinions which 
 threaten their dominion are propagated. Thus 
 the French Monarchy rested upon the belief of 
 most Frenchmen for several centuries that the 
 Monarch embodied National Justice, was a kind 
 of sacramental representative of the nation. 
 When this belief was challenged the French 
 
18 The Prussian Hath Said in His Heart 
 
 Monarchy was in peril. When it was repudiated 
 by the French people, the French Monarchy fell. 
 Much the same is true to-day of Russia, where, 
 if the mass of Russians really ceased to regard 
 the Tsar as the "Little Father" of his people the 
 present form of Government would collapse as it 
 nearly did collapse nine or ten years ago, when 
 confidence in the Autocracy had been for the 
 moment shaken. But Frederick's rule did not 
 rest on opinion or consent : it rested on his com- 
 mand of the army and the army's command of 
 the nation. So long as that command was un- 
 shaken he had nothing to fear from any opinion 
 his subjects might entertain. Nay, the more 
 they debated and wrangled the less likely they 
 were to impede his plans. "My people and I," 
 he said, "have come to an arrangement that suits 
 us both : they are to say what they like and I 
 am to do what I like." That was the sound and 
 far-sighted policy of Frederick, and whenever the 
 HohenzoUems have departed from it they have 
 done so to their own disadvantage. Only yes- 
 terday we saw that the Socialist Party, despite 
 its three million votes, could not deflect by a 
 hair's-breadth the policy of the real masters of 
 the German legions, and therefore of German 
 policy. 
 
The Great Diabolist 19 
 
 It should also be said that Frederick worked 
 hard, and on the whole wisely, to promote the 
 material prosperity of his people; and here again 
 his policy has been followed, more or less accord- 
 ing to their wisdom, by all his successors. Of 
 the precise character of the Prussian "social legis- 
 lation" which Europe has so largely imitated 
 since 1870 I shall speak hereafter. Here I will 
 pause only to note that in this matter as in 
 others the main lines of Prussian policy derive 
 from Frederick, and also perhaps to note a curi- 
 ous historical parallel. In one other very re- 
 mote place there was once erected a State where 
 a regime of terror and a curious perversion of 
 morals were accompaniments of a social system 
 which boasted of having eliminated economic dis- 
 tress. It may seem wild to draw an analogy be- 
 tween a king whose principal vanity was in his 
 emancipation from all the superstitions of reli- 
 gion and an impostor raised to power by one of 
 the most frantic delusions that religious credulity 
 ever inspired. Yet if we study his career closely 
 we shall see that the impostor also had some 
 claims to be considered a great man, and if we 
 disregard non-essentials we shall really find some 
 kinship in the methods and, perhaps, in the souls 
 of Frederick HohenzoUern and Brighom Young. 
 
20 The Prussian Hath Said in His Heart 
 
 Such was the State which Frederick proposed 
 to create, and when, he had created it he was re- 
 solved to make it, sooner or later, the first power 
 in Europe. In international affairs it was his 
 belief that the principle upon which it was 
 founded would be a source, not of weakness, but 
 of strength. That he would be free, upon his 
 principles, to strike treacherously, to violate 
 treaties which others would respect, to make 
 wars without provocation, and to seize territories 
 to which he had no claim, would give him a dis- 
 tinct advantage over his antagonists, as a similar 
 theory of morals (though perhaps not as lucidly 
 defined) gives the garroter and the card-sharper 
 an advantage over their victims. There is no 
 doubt that up to a point he was right. In this 
 present war, for instance, the Prussians would 
 never have taJien Li6ge or Namur, never have 
 forced their way almost to the walls of Paris, had 
 it not been for the respect paid by their enemies 
 to rights and promises which they themselves 
 violated without scruple or shame. The "scrap 
 of paper" argument is not original : it dates like 
 everything else Prussian, from the great Fred- 
 erick; he also called treaties "pretty filigree 
 work." 
 
 Such were the broad outlines of Frederick's 
 
The Great Diabolist 21 
 
 policy. Before we describe how far it succeeded 
 it will be well to take note of the material with 
 which he had to work and of the kind of Europe 
 in which the work had to be done. 
 
 Such a State as Frederick contemplated could 
 not possibly have been established in a country 
 with a vivid memory of the Eoman order or in 
 one with a tradition of great battles fought for 
 political liberty, least of all in one strongly and 
 determinedly Christian. But in all these mat- 
 ters Frederick w,as fortunate. No Eoman le- 
 gionary had ever been within many hundred 
 miles of the farthest outposts of old Prussia. 
 Prussia had no political history; nothing but a 
 series of rulers obeyed in turn by a more or less 
 servile population. That population was of 
 mongrel Slavonic stock originally miled by a 
 small German aristocracy. The Faith reached 
 Prussia far later than it reached Russia or Nor- 
 way, and never penetrated deep. Chaucer, writ- 
 ing at the end of the fourteenth century, speaks 
 of his knight as having fought "against the hea- 
 then in Prussia" Early in the sixteenth century 
 the work, such as it was, was ruined. The Prus- 
 sians, at the command of their princes, became 
 Protestant in the lump without any of those 
 fierce religious disputes and appeals to arms 
 
22 The Prussian Hath Said in His Heart 
 
 which, whether they ended in the victory of the 
 Catholic Church or of its enemies, quickened and 
 refreshed the spirit of other nations. Frederick 
 had therefore little to fear from his own people 
 in the prosecution of his plans. What had he to 
 fear from Europe? 
 
 Here again Frederick's fortune favoured him. 
 In another age such an experiment as his would 
 have been stamped out by a Crusade; but that 
 was not the age of Crusades. The wars of reli- 
 gion had ended long before ; indeed religion itself 
 was all but dead among the rich and powerful 
 and seemed to be dying even among the populace. 
 National wars and wars for civic freedom were 
 equally out of fashion. The typical wars of that 
 age were dynastic. Two families disputed about 
 some point of precedence or inheritance, others 
 joined either combatant as allies. The fighting 
 was done by comparatively small professional 
 armies. The issue was decided to the advantage 
 of one family and to the disadvantage of the 
 other. No larger effect was expected ; any larger 
 effect would have embarrassed both combatants. 
 
 It was in such a moral atmosphere and with 
 such materials at his disposal that Frederick 
 HohenzoUern, king, philosopher and pervert, 
 threw down his challenge to God. 
 
The Great Diabolist 23 
 
 The matter upon which the immediate issue 
 was joined was the right of Maria Theresa to the 
 Hapsburg inheritance. That right was as clear 
 as public law and public treaties could make it. 
 The Pragmatic Sanction by which it was guar- 
 anteed had been assented to by every European 
 sovereign and by none in clearer terms than by 
 Frederick of Prussia. Nevertheless Frederick 
 determined to strike a blow at the Empress and 
 to strike it treacherously. Without a declara- 
 tion of war, without the smallest intimation of 
 his intentions, nay, in the midst of renewed as- 
 surances of support, he invaded Silesia. 
 
 The thing was, of course, simply theft. The 
 Hohenzollerns never had any rights in Silesia 
 that would have borne a moment's examination, 
 and, if they had ever had any, they had long ago 
 renounced them, and Frederick himself had ex- 
 pressly and recently confirmed the renunciation. 
 Any one who doubts the unanswerable character 
 of the case against the King of Prussia in this 
 matter had better be referred to the defence. 
 We have Frederick's own account of the matter, 
 and we have the best that can be said for him by 
 one of the greatest of English — or rather Scotch 
 — men of letters. I quote from Carlyle's Life. 
 Let us hear Frederick first: — 
 
24 The Prussian Hath Said in His Heart 
 
 This Silesia project fulfilled all his (the King's) 
 political views. It was a means of acquiring reputa- 
 tion; of increasing the power of the State; and of 
 terminating what concerned that long-litigated ques- 
 tion of the Berg-Julish Succession. 
 
 Frederick then goes on to weigh the dangers 
 against the chances of success, duly noting 
 "weak condition of the Austrian Court, Treasury 
 empty. War Apparatus broken in pieces, inex- 
 perienced young Princess to defend a disputed 
 succession on those terms/' (nothing could make 
 the man and all he stood for more horribly vivid 
 than this sentence), the chances of an alliance 
 with either France or England, and the death of 
 the Czarina as removing Russia from the list of 
 probable enemies. "Add to these reasons, an 
 Army ready for acting; Funds, Supplies all 
 found and perhaps the desire of making oneself 
 a name, all this was cause of the War which the 
 King now entered upon." 
 
 That is Frederick's confession. It has a start- 
 lingly topical ring. Now let us see what Carlyle 
 has to say for him: — 
 
 As to the justice of his Silesian Claims or even to 
 his own belief about their justice Frederick affords 
 not the least light which can be new to readers here. 
 He speaks when business requires it of "those known 
 rights" of his and with the air of a man who expects 
 
The Great Diabolist 25 
 
 to be believed on his word ( !) ; but it is cursorily, and 
 in the business way only — a man, you would say, con- 
 siderably indifferent to our belief on that head ; his eye 
 on the practical merely. ' ' Just Rights ? ' ' What are 
 rights, never so just which you cannot make valid? 
 The world is full of such. If you have rights and can 
 assert them into facts do it; this is worth doing. 
 
 In other words what matters is not whether 
 Frederick was trying to burgle his neighbour's 
 house or pick his neighbour's pocket, but whether 
 he could do it successfully and keep the swag! 
 One wonders how Carlyle would have liked that 
 argument if used against him by a swindling 
 publisher ! 
 
 The new Atheist creed was now to be seen 
 fully in being and in action. The first betrayal 
 was by no means the last. For the purpose of 
 his unjust and faithless aggression Frederick had 
 leagued himself with Bavaria and with France. 
 The instant his own share of the spoil was secure, 
 he broke faith with his allies and retired from the 
 contest. In 1744 Frederick again attacked Aus- 
 tria without provocation and in the following 
 year he again abandoned his allies without 
 shame. His successive treacheries prospered ex- 
 ceedingly. When at last peace was signed at 
 Aix-la-Chapelle he was the only gainer. He ob- 
 tained Silesia and an immense increase in the 
 
26 The Prussian Hath Said in His Heart 
 
 military prestige of his kingdom. No other 
 power really obtained anything. 
 
 And then, when the full success of the new 
 creed was revealed, a curious thing happened. 
 Something which all men seemed to have forgot- 
 ten, something the existence of which Frederick 
 especially denied, that thing which men had once 
 called Christendom, which they might now call 
 the Common Conscience of Europe, stirred in its 
 sleep. Within less than ten years of the Treaty 
 of Aix a coalition had been formed against the 
 armed champion of injustice which in a faint and 
 half remembered fashion recalled those great 
 coalitions which had waged war under the walls 
 of Acre, at Lepanto and along the Danube. For 
 it was a coalition whose object, though but half 
 conscious, was to destroy and expel from Europe 
 something alien to her soul, something which, if 
 she did not destroy, must sooner or later destroy 
 her. 
 
 The crusade failed. For that failure many 
 reasons might be suggested. The military gen- 
 ius of Frederick was one important factor: the 
 excellence of the great army he had trained so 
 carefully — an army still strictly professional, yet 
 containing a far larger percentage of those who 
 
The Great Diabolist 27 
 
 owned his rule than did any other army of that 
 age— was another. But the most fundamental 
 reason was, perhaps, that Europe, though an- 
 gered and outraged by his insolent and success- 
 ful treason, was not, as it had once been, one in 
 spirit and tradition. It had no one solid cer- 
 tainty to which to rally. Its rulers, long accus- 
 tomed to wage merely dynastic wars, were un- 
 decided, and their motives were mixed. Eng- 
 land, somewhat isolated from Europe and ruled 
 since the Eevolution by a close and very national 
 oligarchy, was ready to become Frederick's ally 
 that she might aid in depressing the House of 
 Bourbon. The throne of France was occupied 
 by a man who was, indeed, by no means the ut- 
 terly base and contemptible person that he has 
 sometimes been painted, but on whose soul had 
 settled a sort of despair, partly, perhaps, the 
 nemesis of excessive self-indulgence, partly the 
 effect upon a very clear intelligence of the con- 
 templation of the irreparable decline of his house 
 and what might well appear to him the decline of 
 his country. The Empress of Eussia was a 
 woman of loose character moved to anger at least 
 as much by Frederick's private gibes as by his 
 public crimes. In Maria Theresa alone, it may 
 
28 'The Prussian Hath Said in His Heart 
 
 be, was there something of the real spirit and 
 creed of Don John of Austria or Kichard Coeur 
 de Lion. 
 
 Anyhow, as the seven years of war approached 
 their end, ally after ally slackened and fell off 
 from the confederacy. When peace came Fred- 
 erick still held Silesia. Injustice, flagrant and 
 unashamed, was confirmed. Atheism, young, 
 vigorous, accoutred, confident in its material 
 strength and in its negative certitudes, had chal- 
 lenged a hesitating, an unprepared, a doubtful 
 Christendom to arms. And Atheism had won. 
 
CHAPTER III 
 
 THE WARS OF ANTI-CHRIST 
 
 The remaining twenty years of Frederick's life 
 were years of all but unbroken peace. Of this 
 peace it is enough to say that, to the Christian 
 conscience, it was more detestable than the worst 
 of his wars. 
 
 At the close of the Seven Years' War Frederick 
 came to one conclusion of immense moment to 
 the future of Prussia and of Europe. He came 
 to the conclusion that there was one Power on 
 the Continent which was too strong for him ever 
 to crush and which he must, therefore, conciliate; 
 for it was of the essence of his philosophy to 
 break the weak and conciliate the strong. The 
 policy which he deliberately adopted towards 
 that power and towards the dynasty that ruled 
 it became a fixed tradition in his family, was 
 pursued unswervingly down to the dismissal of 
 Bismarck, and was never really abandoned until 
 within a year or so of the present date. That 
 power was Eussia. 
 
 29 
 
30 The Prussian Hath Said in His Heart 
 
 It was Frederick's desire to connect himself 
 closely with Eussia. He determined to safe- 
 guard that connection by a dreadful pledge, to 
 confirm it by a horrible sacrament — the murder 
 of a nation. The two powers were to be bound 
 together by partaking together of what Frederick, 
 with a characteristic sort of pleasantry called 
 "the Eucharistic Body" of a third. 
 
 The partition of Poland was Frederick's work 
 and bears the emphatic impress of his mind and 
 will. Eussia was more or less willing and Aus- 
 tria a most reluctant accomplice; neither would 
 have dared to suggest such a crime unprompted. 
 The crime, the most easily accomplished and the 
 most apparently successful of his crimes, has 
 brought its due punishment on Ms descendants. 
 The hatred borne by the Poles to their con- 
 querors, but especially to the most guilty of their 
 conquerors, the Prussians, has been fruitful of 
 evil to his House, and it may be that even now it 
 is in Poland that the Hohenzollern dynasty will 
 find its grave. 
 
 In 1786 Frederick died and went to his ac- 
 count. Far fitter to him than to poor Louis XV 
 would have been the words of his chief eulogist : 
 "Enough for us that he did fall asleep; that 
 curtained in thick night, under what keeping 
 
The Wars of Anti-Christ 31 
 
 we ask not, he at least will never, through unend- 
 ing ages, insult the face of the sun any more." 
 In 1792 his successor, with the help of the Tsar 
 and the Austrian Emperor, carried through a new 
 and more ruthless partition of Poland such as 
 he had always recommended. But, before this, 
 far away in Paris something had changed whose 
 changing was to change the world. 
 
 The policy pursued by Prussia throughout the 
 Revolutionary Wars is worthy of careful atten- 
 tion. It is a distinctly humiliating chapter in 
 her history, but too characteristic to be passed 
 over. 
 
 In those wars the sympathies of the present 
 writer are necessarily with France, and with that 
 creed of human equality, that demand for the 
 ending of privilege for which France stood. But 
 there were high enthusiasms and great loyalties 
 on both sides. Among those French exiles who 
 gathered at Coblentz there were many who fought 
 not for their own privileges, but for that great 
 Monarchy which had been for so many centuries 
 the banner and beacon of France. Passion for 
 an insulted and persecuted Faith was the very 
 soul of the desperate rising of the western peas- 
 antry. And so with foreign enemies of the Ee- 
 publie. A chivalrous compassion for a fallen 
 
32 The Prussian Hath Said in His Heart 
 
 family played its part. To many, too, the de- 
 thronement of the Bourbons seemed a simple de- 
 nial of established right, the beginning of mere 
 anarchy. And, later, as the struggle developed, 
 other and yet nobler elements entered into the 
 opposition to the victorious French advance. 
 The Spaniards fought fiercely through years of 
 humiliation that they might remain Spanish and 
 not French, and something of the same impulse 
 showed itself later and more sluggishly, as was 
 consonant with the less military spirit of the peo- 
 ple, among the Germans. In England the war 
 became a thoroughly national thing; the name 
 which was its symbol was not Pitt, but Nelson. 
 A tenacious and mystical religion informed the 
 invulnerable Russian resistance against which 
 the French at last broke themselves. 
 
 But in none of these enthusiasms, any more 
 than in the hunger for freedom which inspired 
 the Revolution itself, had Prussian any share. In 
 all these great storms in which the souls of na- 
 tions were dashed together or apart, her rulers, 
 faithful to the Frederician tradition, saw only 
 troubled waters in which to fish. But in truth, 
 as they speedily found, such mighty tides were 
 ill-suited for such fishing. 
 
 The first intervention of Prussia in the matter 
 
The Wars of Anti-Christ 33 
 
 was her adhesion to the Declaration of Pillnitz 
 in August 1791. By that declaration the rulers 
 of Prussia and Austria bound themselves to use 
 their combined power for the support of the 
 French Monarchy against the Eevolution. It is 
 the real starting point of the Eevolutionary 
 Wars, though war did not actually break out till 
 nearly a year later. 
 
 The action of the Hapsburgs needs no explana- 
 tion. The Queen of France was of their family 
 and had for more than a year been secretly so- 
 liciting the aid of foreign arms. The King, after 
 holding out for some time, had at last consented 
 to her treason. Pillnitz, so far as Austria was 
 concerned, was the friendly response of the 
 family of Marie Antoinette to her entreaties, 
 strengthened, no doubt, by a certain dread felt 
 by the Hapsburg dynasty lest the example of 
 France should spread to its own subjects. 
 
 It was otherwise with Prussia. The fate of 
 Marie Antoinette, tbe fate of the French royal 
 family, were nothing to the HohenzoUerns. As 
 I have pointed out, Frederick William had less 
 reason to fear popular insurrection in his own 
 country than any other sovereign in Europe, 
 though an instinct may have warned the King of 
 Prussia that a system such as his uncle had es- 
 
34 The Prussian Hath Said in His Heart 
 
 tablished must always find it more or less to its 
 advantage to support tyranny against the asser- 
 tion of popular rights; and certainly the ready 
 lending of such support wherever it can be lent 
 without the sacrifice of any material advantage, 
 has been one of the most consistent traditions of 
 the HohenzoUerns. It may, however, be reason- 
 ably presumed that the main motive of Prussia 
 in moving in the matter was the same as the 
 motive of her previous wars and acts of aggres- 
 sion, the hope of material gain. 
 
 France was weak. That alone was a good 
 Prussian reason for attacking her. Her armies 
 were disorganised and largely worthless. Her 
 Executive was betraying the national cause. If 
 that Executive was overthrown ( as it was soon to 
 be overthrown) there seemed nothing capable of 
 taking its place. Of that power of recovery by a 
 corporate and spontaneous act of the national 
 will which the French, above all Euroi)ean peo- 
 ples, possess, and which was to give them, in so 
 miraculous a fashion, a new government and a 
 new army able at last to conquer Europe, the 
 Prussians were the last people to have any ink- 
 ling. 
 
 To make an armed assault on a neighbour who 
 happened to be at the moment in difficulties was 
 
The Wars of Anti-Christ 35 
 
 a proceeding thoroughly in harmony with the 
 Frederician tradition. As for the clause in their 
 joint declaration whereby the allied sovereigns 
 (the Emperor probably meaning what he said) 
 renounced all personal aims and all thought of 
 territorial annexations, the King of Prussia and 
 his advisers doubtless regarded it as what the 
 great Frederick had called "pretty filigree work," 
 and what the present German Chancellor calls 
 "a scrap of paper." Had Prussia had her way in 
 this or any other moment of the long struggle, 
 France would, one may pretty safely say, have 
 shared the fate of Poland. 
 
 The Declaration of Pillnitz was followed, after 
 many months of hesitation, by a joint invasion 
 of France by the Austrian and Prussian armies 
 under the command of the Duke of Brunswick 
 and the King of Prussia. They had every reason 
 to anticipate a speedy success. The first line of 
 the French resistance on the frontier collapsed 
 as had been anticipated. Then, very unexpect- 
 edly, came the check at Valmy and the retreat. 
 
 With the wonderful epic of the French resist- 
 ance I am not here concerned. I am only con- 
 cerned with the attitude of Prussia towards it; 
 and that attitude becomes at this point exceed' 
 ingly interesting. In January, 1793, King Louis 
 
36 The Prussian Hath Said in His Heart 
 
 was guillotined. In the spring of the same year 
 the Revolutionary Tribunal was set up and the 
 first Committee of the Public Safety chosen. 
 Before the summer was over the Girondins had 
 fallen, and that ruthless, but very necessary, mili- 
 tary dictatorship which we call "the Terror," was 
 finally established. All this shocked Europe, 
 shocked many good men who had at an earlier 
 date been zealous for liberty. England, Spain 
 and several smaller powers joined the Coalition 
 against the Republic. But, as the anger of the 
 honest enemies of the Revolution grows and 
 spreads, it is very noticeable that the eagerness of 
 Prussia, who with Austria had inaugurated the 
 crusade, perceptibly wanes. 
 
 The conquest of France was not, then, to be 
 so easy after all. There was to be no parade to 
 Paris, no "military execution" of that city (so 
 dear to the Prussian heart) as Brunswick had 
 promised. On the contrary, there was to be for- 
 midable and ever-growing resistance, a resistance 
 that was soon to become a vigorous offensive. 
 In October 1793 (it was the same week that 
 Marie Antoinette perished) the French achieved 
 their first real and decisive victory over the Aus- 
 trians at Wattignies. Another victory follows 
 at Fleurus in January 1794. By July 1794 
 
The Wars of Anti-Christ 37, 
 
 Prussia had abandoned her allies and withdrawn 
 from the contest. 
 
 The hope of partitioning France was over for 
 the moment. But Prussia was not without com- 
 pensation elsewhere. In 1795 she added yet an- 
 other slice of Poland to her territory. 
 
 The theft was as easy as it was tempting, for 
 Poland, or what was left of it, had no means of 
 resisting. It was a different thing when the 
 Prussian rulers, turning again, found themselves 
 confronted with Napoleon. 
 
 In dealing with Napoleon, Prussia showed 
 unusual caution. She saw his armies over-run 
 Western Germany; she was angry and terribly 
 afraid, but she offered no resistance. Then she 
 tried to bargain. Might she have Hanover as 
 the price of her neutrality? Napoleon tempo- 
 rized ; he knew she was treacherous, but he was 
 at the moment bent on crushing more determined 
 antagonists. Then bribes were offered from the 
 other side ; an armed alliance with Austria and 
 Eussia, subsidies from England. Frederick Wil- 
 liam almost made up his mind to join the second 
 Coalition. His envoy approached Napoleon with 
 a threatening letter — practically a declaration of 
 war — in his pocket. But, while he was waiting 
 for an audience, Napoleon was annihilating the 
 
38 The Prussian Hath Said in His Heart 
 
 Austrian and Russian armies at Austerlitz ; and 
 a friendly epistle conveying to the conqueror the 
 congratulations of the King of Prussia and offer- 
 ing him an honourable and permanent alliance 
 was hastily substituted! So matters went on — 
 the Prussian statesmen alternately fawned on 
 Napoleon and stabbed at him in the dark. At 
 last he resolved to be rid of them. At Jena the 
 great army which was the very framework of 
 Prussia was broken in pieces. 
 
 Prussia, her Crown reduced to vassalage and 
 her army limited by the veto of her conqueror, 
 counted for nothing, until Napoleon blundered 
 into the invasion of Eussia, the failure of which 
 made possible the last European combination 
 against him. To that combination Prussia gave 
 her adherence, and when France was invaded in 
 1814 her troops distinguished themselves by the 
 peculiarly abominable character of the outrages 
 by which they avenged the humiliation of Jena 
 on helpless non-combatants. Torture was freely 
 resorted to. The full story of these abominations 
 may be read in the pages of Houssaye. In the 
 judgment of that very accurate historian the 
 Prussians behaved, if anything, rather worse 
 than the Cossacks — then an irregular and more 
 or less barbaric force of auxiliaries, whose out- 
 
The Wars of Anti-Christ 39 
 
 breaks of savagery were doubtless spontaneous. 
 It is probable that the Prussian atrocities, like 
 those recently committed in Belgium and France, 
 were deliberate and organised. Indeed a genera- 
 tion before Frederick had treated Saxony in 
 much the same fashion. 
 
 At Vienna Prussia made some attempt to re- 
 vive her favourite project for partitioning 
 France, but her more honest allies refused and 
 insisted that the restored Bourbons should re- 
 ceive their inheritance intact. Frederick Wil- 
 liam, however, obtained a considerable accession 
 of territory in Germany itself, including the 
 wealthy and strategically invaluable Khine prov- 
 inces. 
 
 Nevertheless the epoch of the Kevolutionary 
 Wars was not an epoch suited to the full develop- 
 ment of Prussian policy. It was a time of great 
 passions and high ideals clashing with each 
 other. It had the smell of the morning, and great 
 men with something of the simplicity of children 
 were its chief figures. In such an age a power 
 whose first principle was a cynical materialism, 
 and whose aims were purely predatory, might 
 pick up a province here and there in the con- 
 fusion. But it was in constant danger of being 
 struck down by the great blows that were being 
 
40 The Prussian Hath Said in His Heart 
 
 exchanged over its head. It was the settled un- 
 belief of eighteenth century Europe that had 
 made possible the raids of Frederick and the es- 
 tablishment of Prussian power. The Freder- 
 ician tradition could hardly succeed so solidly 
 again until the fires of the Eevolution had died 
 out and the world was again weary of high 
 hopes. 
 
 Many doubtless thought that those fires had 
 been trodden out in 1815; but they were wrong. 
 The Eevolution was conquered too late. The 
 armies of the Empire had carried with them 
 everywhere the thoughts that remade Europe. 
 Nothing could ever be the same again, and it was 
 not long before the artificial structure set up by 
 the diplomatists of the old world at Vienna be- 
 gan to crack and crumble. Much of that struc- 
 ture still remains ; it will perhaps be part of the 
 ultimate task of the present war to clear away 
 what is left of it. But it did not endure even for 
 twenty years in the solid peace which the Holy 
 Alliance hoped to make perpetual. Humanity 
 struggled perpetually against it. Perhaps the 
 most desperate of its struggles was that with 
 which we associate the year 1848. It is of spe- 
 cial importance in connection with the subject 
 of this book, because its failure (in the main) 
 
The Wars of Anti-Christ 41 
 
 makes the starting point from which once more 
 we see Prussia emerging as a great military 
 power intent on brigandage at the expense of its 
 neighbours. 
 
 In 1848, by one of those instinctive movements, 
 which are native to her and prove her to be really 
 one, all Europe stirred. In France the attempt 
 to erect a "Constitutional Monarchy" on the Eng- 
 lish model — a thing wholly unnational — was de- 
 stroyed by popular insurrection. Its overthrow! 
 was the signal for an explosion all over Europe. 
 Italy rose and Hungary, and there was a ferment 
 in the Germanics. For the first and last time in 
 their history even the Prussians moved. 
 
 As a whole the movement failed. In France, 
 indeed, the Bourbons fell and, after a few years 
 of unstable equilibrium, an overwhelming expres- 
 sion of the national will demanded that popular 
 dictatorship to which the French have so con- 
 tinually recurred and will probably recur again. 
 In Italy the King of Sardinia, standing forth in 
 alliance with the Pope as the champion of the 
 national cause, was defeated, and the hold of the 
 Hapsburgs on the northern provinces for the 
 time confirmed. In Poland and in Hungary in- 
 surrectionary movements were crushed by a com- 
 bination of the rulers of Russia, Austria and 
 
42 The Prussian Hath Said in His Heart 
 
 Prussia. In England the last rally of the Chart- 
 ists collapsed on Kennington Common. 
 
 The Prussian struggle is mainly of interest 
 from the point of view of this book in so far as 
 it brings for the first time into prominence the 
 man who was to revive "the Frederician tradi- 
 tion" as an active factor in European politics — 
 Prince Otto von Bismarck. 
 
 Prince Bismarck is interesting in more ways 
 than one. His character and career serve to 
 show how deep the tradition of the great Fred- 
 erick had sunk into the Prussian mind. Bis- 
 marck was not, like Frederick, a man whose 
 whole soul was possessed of evil. Hte was neither 
 an Atheist nor a pervert. He seems to have held 
 sincerely to the vague Lutheranism of his up- 
 bringing, and he was beyond question a most af- 
 fectionate and faithful husband. The contrast 
 between his private and his public character can 
 be accounted for only on the assumption that he 
 accepted without question the doctrine that pub- 
 lic affairs were outside the sphere of morals. 
 Those who think this incredible cannot have real- 
 ised how violently a false religion can warp those 
 moral instincts which are the voice of God in the 
 soul. As men, not without their own morsil 
 standard, will nevertheless consent under pres- 
 
The Wars of Anti-Christ 43 
 
 sure of an evil creed to abominations such as hu- 
 man sacrifice or cannibalism in earlier times, or 
 in our own time, to "eugenics," and even to such 
 folly as the denial of Christmas beer to paupers, 
 so Bismarck, no diabolist like Frederick, but a 
 politician inheriting a certain policy, could be 
 simply blind to the idea of moral responsibility 
 as applied to international relations. 
 
 In 1848 it was his foresight and decision which 
 largely helped to save the Prussian Monarchy 
 from annihilation by the revolutionary move- 
 ment; and, when his defensive methods had suc- 
 ceeded, he emerged as an adviser, and later as the 
 principal adviser, of the Prussian Crown. 
 
 Frederick William IV, who was King of Prus- 
 sia during the revolutionary movement of '48, 
 was a sovereign whose mind was from the first 
 menaced and finally overwhelmed by that insan- 
 ity which has continually attacked the Hohen- 
 zollern dynasty. In 1857 he was compelled to 
 abdicate the functions of ruler to his brother. In 
 1861 he died, and this same brother succeeded 
 him as King under the title of William I. 
 
 William I was, on the whole, the best of the 
 Hohenzollems. From the beginning of the Dan- 
 ish trouble, when he would keep repeating the in- 
 contestable but (as it seemed to Bismarck) 
 
44 The Prussian Hath Said in His Heart 
 
 wholly irrelevant remark : "I have no right to 
 Holstein," to the day of his final triumph, when 
 his personal intervention forbade the Prussians 
 to hang the Mayor of "Versailles, he was always 
 annoying or embarrassing his great counsellor by 
 exhibiting inconvenient symptoms of a sense of 
 honour. Yet it was in his reign that some of the 
 worst piracies and frauds of Prussia were com- 
 mitted. 
 
 That fact is not without interest since it il- 
 lustrates in another aspect the fixed character of 
 the Prussian State. It was a monarchy and vir- 
 tually an autocratic monarchy, but not really a 
 personal monarchy. The will of the individual 
 king counted for almost as little as the will of 
 the people. The Thing that governed and still 
 governs Prussia was a tradition. The real auto- 
 crat of Prussia had a signal advantage over all 
 the other tyrants of the earth. He was dead. 
 
 Of the policy of Bismarck we have a very full, 
 and, on the whole, a fairly reliable account from 
 his own pen. In the ordinary way one would 
 not go to a criminal for the truth about his 
 crimes. But the very curious psychology of Bis- 
 marck enables us to trust him in the main as to 
 facts. On the one hand he was a man who, other 
 things being equal, preferred telling the truth to 
 
The Wars of Anti-Christ 45 
 
 lying, and, on the other, the enormous gap in his 
 conscience, where politics were concerned, made 
 it possible for him to confess without a thought 
 of apology to actions of which a West Indian 
 buccaneer would have been slightly ashamed. 
 He will sometimes distort facts and argue spe- 
 ciously to cover his errors of judgment; but 
 hardly ever to cover his violations of morals. 
 The very words had, in such a connection, no 
 meaning for him. 
 
 The principal aim of Bismarck's policy or, to 
 speak more exactly, of the traditional policy 
 which Bismarck inherited and carried forward 
 with such marked success, was the imposition on 
 all Germany of the Prussian yoke. Germany 
 first, and then, perhaps, Europe was to be remade 
 in the image of that Atheist State which the 
 great Frederick had imagined and within the 
 limits of his own Kingdom, achieved. 
 
 To suppose that Bismarck was seeking merely 
 the national unity of Germany is entirely to mis- 
 understand the man and his policy. Unity, if 
 that were all, could have been achieved in 1848, 
 when the Frankfort Convention demanded it and 
 was even ready to place the Federal Crown on 
 the head of the King of Prussia if he would re- 
 ceive it at their hands. The offer was refused. 
 
46 The Prussian Hath Said in His Heart 
 
 Not unity but domination was what Prussia was 
 seeking, and domination, even with a Hohenzol- 
 lem on the Imperial throne, would at that date 
 have met with active resistance and have failed. 
 It required long years of tortuous diplomacy and 
 three carefully engineered wars to prepare the 
 ground for it and make it possible. Bismarck 
 sometimes used for public purposes the cant of 
 German Nationalism, but you will find nothing 
 but the chilliest contempt for it and its profes- 
 sors in his private reminiscences. 
 
 One of the first problems with which Bismarck 
 was faced was a legacy left behind, to his people's 
 undoing, by the worst of Frederick's crimes — 
 the partition of Poland. The ever-living agony 
 of the nation that was murdered, yet could not 
 and cannot die, was again producing disturb- 
 ances dang'erous to the partitioning Powers and 
 to all Europe. The Tsar was weary of his part 
 in the evil inheritance, of all the woes it had 
 brought him and his people. The wiser Bussian 
 statesmen were for a policy of conciliation, and 
 Alexander II, a reformer, the liberator of the 
 serfs, was disposed to listen to them. Bismarck 
 himself tells us that "feeling in St. Petersburg 
 remained for a good while undecided, being dom- 
 inated in about equal measure by absolutist prin- 
 
The Wars of Anti-Christ 47 
 
 ciples and Polish sympathies." Meanwhile Aus- 
 tria, France and England were urging the Tsar 
 to grant the Poles a Constitution with liberty 
 for their religion and their language. It was 
 Prussia that threw her whole weiglit into the 
 other scale and ultimately determined the issue. 
 
 Bismarck makes no attempt to disguise either 
 the fact or the motives that prompted it. He 
 writes : — 
 
 The conflict of opinion was very lively in St. Peters- 
 burg when I left that capital in April 1862, and it so 
 continued throughout my first year of office. I took 
 charge of the Foreign Office under the impression that 
 the insurrection which had broken out on January 1st, 
 1863, brought up the question not only of the interests 
 of our eastern provinces but also the wider one, 
 whether the Russian Cabinet was dominated by Polish 
 or Anti-Polish proclivities, by an effort after Russo- 
 Polish fraternization in the Anti-German' Pan-Slavish 
 interest or by one for mutual reliance between Russia 
 and Prussia. 
 
 In the end Bismarck got his way. A military 
 convention was entered into between the two 
 Grovernments. The Tsar promised not to give a 
 Constitution to Poland, and the King of Prussia 
 guaranteed the help of the Prussian troops in the 
 task of suppressing the Polish insurgents. In 
 the face of this armed menace the Powers which 
 had been pressing for a generous policy found it 
 
48 The Prussian Hath Said in His Heart' 
 
 necessary to retreat. The cause of Poland, both 
 at Warsaw and Posen, was lost. 
 
 The situation, together with the part played 
 by Prussia in regard to it, reproduced itself very 
 nearly in 1905 ; and there is a special reason for 
 recalling it to-day. There are those who are dis- 
 posed to be sceptical about the sincerity of the 
 Tsar's promise of freedom to a united Poland. 
 The attitude is not unintelligible in the light of 
 many things that have happened in the past, but 
 those who adopt it ought to weigh well the very 
 significant fact that their doubts are not shared 
 by those Polish Nationalists who have spent their 
 whole lives in resisting the Eussian Government 
 and protesting against Eussian rule. They are 
 the last people in the world who are likely to be 
 sentimentally credulous about the deeds and 
 words of their life-long opponents; yet they are 
 one and all enthusiastic for the war, and look 
 upon it as a war of certain liberation for their 
 country. The explanation is, of course, that 
 the Poles know the history of the trouble and the 
 English generally do not. They know that Eus- 
 sian opinion, even Eussian official opinion, has 
 always been strongly divided on the Polish ques- 
 tion, that there has always been in the highest 
 places, in the palace itself, an active and influ- 
 
The Wars of Anti-Christ 49 
 
 ential Pro-Polish party which has more than once 
 nearly had its way; they also know that the 
 steady and relentless influence which has ever 
 thwarted such hopes has been the determined op- 
 position of the ruling house of Prussia, the orig- 
 inal instigators of the dismemberment and the 
 untiring supporters of the oppression of Poland 
 ever since. And they know that the war which 
 has broken Prussian influence in Russia forever, 
 and has already given a native name to the Rus- 
 sian capital, must inevitably have meant the res- 
 urrection of Poland, even if no promise of any 
 kind had been given. 
 
 In the matter of Poland Prussia intervened as 
 the supporter of an old wrong ; but she was soon 
 to show that she had by no means lost her appe- 
 tite for committing new ones. She was already 
 looking round for some one whom she could 
 easily and profitably rob. Her eye fell on the 
 small and inoffensive Kingdom of Denmark. 
 
 There is no need to apologize for so stating the 
 case, for it is practically the way in which the 
 chief conspirator himself stated it. In public 
 and in treating with other nations Bismarck 
 might find it convenient to put forward many 
 more or less inconsistent excuses for his policy, 
 pleading now that he was protecting the op- 
 
50 The Prussian Hath Said in His Heart 
 
 pressed German population of Holstein, whose 
 immemorial rights he subsequently treated as 
 waste paper; now that he was merely carrying 
 out the decision of the German Confederation 
 whose judgment, when almost immediately after- 
 wards given against him, he dismissed with con- 
 tempt; affecting at one time a concern for the 
 wrongs of the Prince of Augustenberg, whose 
 cause, as soon as it had served its turn, he was to 
 abandon without scruple ; and at another a sense 
 of loyally to his Austrian ally whom, as soon as 
 the alliance had ceased to be profitable, he was to 
 attack without remorse. But at the counsel 
 board such hypocrisies were put aside. Here 
 are his own words: — 
 
 The gradations which appeared attainable in the 
 Danish question, every one of them meaning for the 
 duchies an advance to something better than existing 
 conditions, culminated, in my judgment, in the acqui- 
 sition of the duchies by Prussia, a view which I 
 expressed in a council held immediately after the death 
 of Frederick VII. I reminded the King that every 
 one of his immediate ancestors, not even excepting his 
 brother, had won an increment of territory for the 
 state; Frederick William IV had acquired Hohen- 
 zoUem and the Jahde district ; Frederick "William III, 
 the Rhine province; Frederick William II, Poland; 
 Frederick II, Silesia ; Frederick William I, Old Hither 
 Pomerania ; the Great Elector, Farther Pomerania and 
 
The Wars of Anti-Christ 51 
 
 Magdeburg, Minden, etc.; and I encouraged Mm to 
 do likewise. 
 
 To pick a quarrel with Denmark was not dif- 
 ficult, nor was it difficult to find a cause of quar- 
 rel in which Prussia might look for the support 
 of the Germanies as a whole. The King of Den- 
 mark was also Duke of Schleswig-Holstein, and 
 as such a member of the German Confederation. 
 The population of one of these duchies was al- 
 most wholly, that of the other partly, German. 
 It was the policy of the Danish royal family to 
 incorporate the duchies more and more with their 
 kingdom, a policy to which German feeling was 
 naturally hostile. The long, simmering quarrel 
 which had already produced one short and in- 
 decisive war was sharply revived by the death of 
 King Frederick VII. The Danish contention 
 was that the duchies should descend as a matter 
 of course with the Danish Crown. The German 
 Powers maintained that the succession had noth- 
 ing to do with Denmark, and was a matter for 
 the Germanic body. A pretender was brought 
 forward in the person of the Prince of Augusten- 
 berg and backed more or less by all the German 
 States. Meanwhile Bismarck cared little for the 
 Germanic body and nothing at all for the Prince 
 
52 The Prussian Hath Said in His Heart' 
 
 of Augustenberg. His views on the Danish ques- 
 tion were simply those of an enlightened burg- 
 lar. But the Bund and the Prince were alike 
 useful to him at the moment and he used them 
 both. 
 
 To cut a long story short, the result of the in- 
 trigues was that the Danes found their country 
 invaded by the united armies of Prussia and Aus- 
 tria. 
 
 Matters would probably never have reached 
 that stage, but for the belief prevalent among the 
 Danes, and deliberately encouraged by Bismarck 
 himself, that England and France would in the 
 last resort protect them against the high-handed 
 violence of the Germanic powers. The hope 
 proved unfounded. Palmerston would have 
 liked to have saved Denmark, but in fact he only 
 hastened her ruin. Though at the height of his 
 power and though possessed of a physical vigour, 
 which in view of his age struck men as miracu- 
 lous, his judgment, as I think those who study the 
 story of his last Ministry will feel, was not what 
 it had been in 1840, in 1848, and in 1854. He 
 became querulous and a prey to what seem to 
 have been unfounded suspicions, especially in re- 
 gard to the Emperor Napoleon, who had once 
 been his ally and whom he had been the first to 
 
The Wars of Anti-Christ 53 
 
 congratulate on the coup d'etat. These suspi- 
 cions had led him, through an old friend to Pol- 
 ish aspirations, to hang back when Napoleon III 
 proposed to meet the armed menace of the Prus- 
 sian military convention by a counter-menace. 
 Napoleon was angry at what he considered a de- 
 sertion, and his resentment led him to refuse ef- 
 fective support over the Danish question. And 
 Palmerston would not or could not move alone. 
 
 Never was political cowardice and faithless- 
 ness more justly and severely punished than in 
 the case of the two powers which, being bound in 
 honour and by treaty to defend Denmark, left 
 her to her fate. Had France and England acted 
 as became them in 1864, there would perhaps 
 have been no Sedan. There would certainly 
 have been no Kiel Canal. 
 
 The Danes, deserted and hopelessly out- 
 matched, put up a brave fight, but were, of course, 
 soon crushed. Then it began to dawn on the vari- 
 ous parties concerned, on the Austrian Govern- 
 ment, on the States of the German Confedera- 
 tion, as well as on the Prince of Augustenberg, 
 that Prussia, having got her troops into the 
 duchies, had no intention of ever taking them 
 out again. Bismarck was not much concerned 
 for the woes of the poor, duped pretender, who. 
 
54 The Prussian Hath Said in His Heart 
 
 perhaps, did not deserve much sympathy, or for 
 the protests of the Germanic Body, which he al- 
 ways speaks of in his memoirs as a kind of joke. 
 But Austria might be troublesome; so to Aus- 
 tria propositions were made. Thinly veiled they 
 amounted to this : that Austria should take one 
 duchy and Prussia the other, and that the two 
 should then tell the Prince of Augustenberg and 
 the Germanic Body to go to the devil ! 
 
 Austria refused this amiable proposal, and in- 
 sisted on convoking the German Confederation. 
 The Federation instantly and all but unani- 
 mously voted Prussia guilty of a breach of faith, 
 and an offence against the public law of Ger- 
 many. Prussia's reply was a sudden and success- 
 ful attack on her ally. 
 
 Austria was unprepared. The preparations of 
 Prussia had been made far in advance and were 
 perfect. The new breech-loading needle guns 
 would have been enough alone to decide the issue. 
 A brief campaign, culminating in the battle of 
 Sadowa, compelled Austria to sue for peace. 
 
 Prussia was now free to have her will with the 
 little German States that had sat in judgment 
 on her, and she had it very thoroughly. Han- 
 over, Hesse-Cassell, Nassau, the free city of 
 Frankfort, and other northern allies of Austria, 
 
The Wars of Anti-Christ 55 
 
 were deprived of their independence and annexed 
 to Prussia. Saxony only escaped the same fate 
 because the appeal of Austria on her behalf was 
 backed by France. Those States which had not 
 taken sides against Prussia were reduced to prac- 
 tical vassalage though retaining technical inde- 
 pendence. The Catholic States of the South, 
 Bavaria, Wiirtemberg, Baden, had to purchase 
 the integrity of their territory at the cost of ac- 
 cepting a Prussian alliance, which was to prove, 
 as it was meant to prove, fatal to the independ- 
 ence and, at last, perhaps, to the soul of South 
 Germany. In point of fact Austria's collapse, 
 surrender and abandonment of her allies had de- 
 livered all the Germanies into the Prussian grip. 
 There was no longer an alternative. Every 
 German State must now accept such terms of 
 vassalage as Prussia offered, for it really de- 
 pended on Prussia whether such a State should 
 be allowed to exist at all. 
 
 Thus was the way made clear for a German 
 Empire of a very different kind from that 
 planned some thirty years before at Frankfort 
 — a German Empire in which the Hohenzollerns 
 should not only reign but rule, and by means of 
 which, under whatever forms might be necessary 
 to disguise the process, Prussian government 
 
56 The Prussian Hath Said in His Heart 
 
 should be forcibly imposed on the Germanies. 
 Only one thing was necessary to complete the 
 process; a foreign war in which the Germanies 
 should fight under Prussian leadership and which 
 should afford an excuse for imposing on them 
 the Prussian military system. Bismarck was 
 not likely to be long in supplying such a want. 
 He soon found a cause for a quarrel with France. 
 
 The French diplomatists were by no means free 
 from blame in the matter. They both under- 
 rated the power and misunderstood the temper 
 of the antagonist with whom they had to deal. 
 They thought France far better prepared and 
 Prussia far less well prepared for war than each 
 respectively was. They do not api)ear to have 
 known that the rest of the German States would 
 be compelled to follow Prussia. Finally, by a 
 fatal miscalculation, they imagined that Prussia 
 wanted peace, whereas, in fact, though the Em- 
 peror probably sought for peace honestly, the 
 men who dominated Prussian policy, and espe- 
 cially the greatest of them, were eager for 
 war. 
 
 As we now know, the formal dispute over the 
 proposed candidature of a Hohenzollern for the 
 vacant Spanish throne, would never of itself have 
 led to war. The candidature had been with- 
 
The Wars of Anti-Christ 57 
 
 drawn, and though France was pressing, rather 
 rashly and over-emphatically, for further assur- 
 ances, there was nothing even remotely approach- 
 ing a threat of war. There was not a diplomatist 
 in Europe who, after the withdrawal of the can- 
 didature of Prince Leopold, did not expect and 
 hope that there would be peace. Bismarck was 
 only a partial exception. He expected and 
 feared that there would be peace. 
 
 So bitterly did Bismarck resent the satisfac- 
 tory turn that events were taking that, as he him- 
 self tells us, he had formed the intention of re- 
 signing his office. He did not fulfil this inten- 
 tion for, when his spirits were at their lowest, 
 fortune brought him an extraordinary opportu- 
 nity of which few men in history but he would 
 have felt able to take advantage. In order to 
 make impossible the peaceful settlement which 
 he dreaded and deplored, he did a thing unprec- 
 edented, I suppose, in all the shifty and dubious 
 records of European diplomacy. He deliber- 
 ately forged a public document. 
 
 Bismarck was staying at Ems; his friends 
 Moltke and Boon were with him. A telegram 
 arrived sent to him by the orders of the King 
 describing the progress of the negotiations with 
 France. Its meaning was plain enough. It ex- 
 
58 The Prussian Hath Said in His Heart 
 
 plained that the French Ambassador had asked 
 for certain promises which the King had not felt 
 able to give without further consideration, and 
 Bismarck's advice was asked as to whether this 
 incident of the negotiations should be communi- 
 cated to the Press and to the Prussian envoys at 
 foreign courts. It added that the King did not, 
 at that stage of the proceedings, propose to have 
 any further personal interviews with the Ambas- 
 sador — the implication being, of course, that ne- 
 gotiations would be continued through the or- 
 dinary diplomatic channels. 
 
 Bismarck took the telegram and with his own 
 hand altered it in such a fashion as to utterly 
 falsify its meaning and to make it appear that 
 the French Ambassador had been dismissed from 
 the Emperor's presence provocatively, if not with 
 insult. Then he published it and sent it to the 
 envoys. That the statement he sent to both was 
 wholly false, and that the document he really re- 
 ceived bore an entirely different meaning from 
 that of the document he professed to produce is 
 acknowledged in his own memoirs without the 
 smallest attempt at concealment or apology. 
 Nay, he recalls complacently how delighted 
 Moltke was at the complete change which Bis- 
 marck had affected in the sense of the telegram. 
 
The Wars of Anti-Christ 59 
 
 "Now it has a different ring," remarked that 
 veteran soldier. 
 
 The fraud succeeded. The French Ministers 
 saw the telegram published by authority in the 
 Press. They could not know that it was a for- 
 gery. They did what Bismarck confessedly 
 meant them to do. They declared war. 
 
 It is unnecessary to say what followed. An 
 amazing absence of foresight on the part of the 
 Emperor and his advisers — though the "Lib- 
 erals" in the new chamber must bear a share of 
 the responsibility — left the French defences 
 quite insuflficient. Even the new artillery to 
 which Prussia had owed her victory over Austria 
 was not adopted. A few weeks decided the war. 
 France, -indeed, both behind the walls of Paris 
 and on the Loire, long continued a heroic and 
 hopeless struggle. But the end was already cer- 
 tain. France was saddled with a monstrous in- 
 demnity, which her peasants paid with a readi- 
 ness astonishing to those who knew nothing of 
 the reserves of a free people. The inhabitants 
 of two of her provinces were forced under an 
 alien yoke made the more galling by the utter in- 
 capacity of her conquerors for the work of their 
 government. And for a generation all Europe 
 lay at the feet of the Anti-Christ. 
 
CHAPTEE IV 
 
 THE WORSHIP OF THE BEAST 
 
 It is inevitable that the events recorded in the 
 last chapter should raise in the mind a question 
 similar to that which was occasioned by the ex- 
 ploits of Frederick the Great. ' Granted that the 
 re-appearance of Prussia in the r61e of inter- 
 national brigand is explicable by the persistence 
 of the Frederician tradition, why was that brig- 
 andage tolerated by Europe? Why did the three 
 protesting powers fail to show the same readiness 
 to use armed force for the defence of Polish lib- 
 erty as Prussia showed to use that force for its 
 repression? Why did England at the last mo- 
 ment abandon Denmark to her fate? Why did 
 Napoleon III permit, to his own ruin, the steam- 
 rollering of the small German States and the 
 erection of a huge and aggressive military mon- 
 archy at his doors? Why did all the powers al- 
 low France to be coerced into accepting the terms 
 dictated by her conqueror? 
 We have seen that in the eighteenth century 
 
 60 
 
The Worship of the Beast 61 
 
 the neglect of the European powers to combine 
 at once against Frederick, and the failure of that 
 combination, when they did attempt it, to achieve 
 its end, may be attributed to the low ebb to which 
 belief in ideals of any kind had fallen in Europe, 
 to the preoccupation of her rulers with dynastic 
 quarrels, and to the weakening and virtual dis- 
 appearance of the conception of a united Chris- 
 tendom by which nations could be judged. The 
 nineteenth century had seen a resurrection of 
 idealism. Foreign policy was no longer mainly 
 dynastic in its aims. And, though unity was 
 still unachieved, the idea of a common conscience 
 of Europe was, as a fruit of the Eevolution 
 and its dogmas, much more familiar to men than 
 in 1740. Yet nineteenth-century Europe did not 
 make against Bismarck even such an effort as 
 eighteenth-century Europe had made against 
 Frederick. 
 
 The explanation must be found, I think, mainly 
 (though there were, of course, many accidental, 
 contributory causes) in appearance and grow- 
 ing strength, especially in Western Europe, of a 
 certain doctrine and spirit as remote from the 
 original ideals of the Revolution as it was un- 
 chivalrous, and intensely unchristian. Though 
 this thing began to be recognizable and even 
 
62 The Prussian Hath Said in His Heart 
 
 recognised very soon after the end of the Na- 
 poleonic wars, it was long before a name was 
 found that defined it with any exactitude. A 
 name has of late years been coined for it, a 
 name with which etymologists will quarrel, but 
 which perhaps expresses the idea sufficiently. 
 We call it Pacifism. 
 
 I have called this doctrine unchristian and 
 in almost any country but this the expression 
 would pass as a truism. It is noticeable that in 
 France, for example, though the Eevolution was 
 emphatically a military thing, and its noblest as- 
 pect the great legend of armed national resist- 
 ance to an armed Europe, yet the only people 
 whom Pacifism at all infected were those so- 
 called "Radicals" and "Socialists" whose ruling 
 passion was really a hatred of the Christian 
 name. In England, however, where the doc- 
 trine took its first and strongest hold, though 
 generally popular with "Freethinkers" of various 
 kinds, it found its main strength in those re- 
 ligious sects which have departed farthest from 
 the old creed of Christendom. The phrase may, 
 therefore, appear paradoxical, and it may be well 
 to amplify it. 
 
 To my mind Pacifism seems merely a sort of 
 allotropic modification of that Atheism which 
 
The Worship of the Beast 63 
 
 Frederick the Great made the foundation of the 
 Prussian State. Its basis is materialistic; and 
 in all its different forms of expression its ulti- 
 mate appeal is always to one or two dogmas, both 
 of which are obviously dogmas of Materialism. 
 One is that the sole test of national policy is its 
 tendency to increase material wealth : the other 
 is that of all evils those which men ought most 
 to dread, avoid and feel a horror of inflicting, 
 are physical pain and death. 
 
 I have said that the new creed took its earliest 
 and strongest hold in England; and in each of 
 its main aspects it is more or less summed up in 
 the personality and work of an Englishman of 
 genius : the one a middle-class manufacturer, of 
 extraordinary lucidity of mind and unequalled 
 powers of exposition and persuasion, the other a 
 young member of the squirearchy whose inca- 
 pacity to think is to most of our minds redeemed 
 by a power over the English language as an in- 
 strument of music to which no parallel can be 
 found in the whole history of our literature. 
 
 Much as Eichard Cobden hated war, it is 
 doubtful if, but for the great war with which 
 the nineteenth century opened, he would ever 
 have become the European power that he un- 
 doubtedly was. From that war, after Waterloo, 
 
64 The Prussian Hath Said in His Heart 
 
 Great Britain emerged, if not the first nation in 
 Europe, at least the nation on whose evidences of 
 power, prosperity and security the eyes of Europe 
 were especially fixed. She enjoyed for many 
 decades something of the prestige which, as we 
 shall see, has belonged to Prussia since 1870. 
 And this fact synchronized with three others. 
 Firstly, the naval predominance which she had 
 enjoyed throughout the war had given her for 
 twenty years a virtual monopoly of over-sea 
 trade; secondly, her capital, long ago conven- 
 iently concentrated in the hands of a small 
 wealthy class, was being used vigorously for the 
 exploitation both of the mineral resources of the 
 country and of those mechanical inventions 
 which British genius had achieved a generation 
 or so before; finally there had arisen in Eng- 
 land and Scotland a succession of great men who 
 laid the foundations of the science of political 
 economy. 
 
 Cobden was the child as well as the interpreter 
 of these things. He was perfectly fitted for his 
 task. What he saw he saw clearly, and could ex- 
 pound with admirable lucidity. What he did not 
 see, he simply did not see at all. He could see 
 that it is of the essence of war to destroy wealth, 
 just as he could see that protective tariffs neces- 
 
The Worship of the Beast 65 
 
 sarily involve a diminution of wealth. To the 
 national point of view from which both wars and 
 tariffs may in particular cases be justified, even 
 on materialistic grounds, by their ultimate re- 
 sults, he was simply blind. It should be added 
 that he had the strength which is derived from 
 strict consistency and that he was (what was 
 rare in a politician even then and would have 
 been a miracle a generation or so later) really 
 incorruptible. His influence on British policy, 
 though indirect, and perhaps the more because it 
 was indirect, was immense. 
 
 The other man to whom I have referred, though 
 infinitely inferior to Cobden in logical acumen, is 
 not to be ignored. If we ask how a thousand 
 follies and preposterous doctrines, from the 
 wickedness of meat-eating to the legitimacy of 
 wife-desertion (which have no more to do with 
 democracy than cannibalism has), got mixed up 
 with the demand for political and social justice, 
 the answer, so far as England is concerned, 
 will very often prove to be — Shelley. Shelley 
 began life as a crude and dogmatic Atheist ; as he 
 grew older his views became more complex or, as 
 I should be inclined to say, more muddle-headed ; 
 but they never, the assurances of pious divines 
 notwithstanding, got any nearer to the historic 
 
66 The Prussian Hath Said in His Heart 
 
 faith of Christendom. He had a keen sense of 
 pity, which was highly honourable to him, but, 
 since his philosophy remained at root materialist, 
 he was, in striking contrast to the men of the 
 Eevolution and to Byron, more shocked at phy- 
 sical suffering than at moral injustice. His 
 marvellous genius as a poet gave imperishable 
 endurance to his rather weak and wandering 
 views ; and he became and still remains the chief 
 prophet of sentimental Pacifism, just as Cobden 
 provided an intellectual basis for rationalistic 
 Pacifism. 
 
 It may seem at first sight that I am dwelling 
 too long on matters apparently irrelevant to my 
 subject. It is, however, the very purpose of this 
 book to show the triumph of Prussia as the tri- 
 umph of a certain creed ; and in order to explain 
 that triumph it is important to note that it was 
 never plainly confronted with its true contrary, 
 held equally confidently and equally ready to 
 appeal to arms. The true opposite of the denial 
 of right (which was the fundamental dogma of 
 Prussia) was the assertion of right; if neces- 
 sary, by force and at any cost of life and suffer- 
 ing. But the doctrine which was more and more 
 identified with "Liberalism" in Western Europe 
 was not the assertion of right but its non-asser- 
 
The Worship of the Beast 67 
 
 tion. PMlosophically it was founded on the 
 same first principle as was the Prussian doc- 
 trine, as in practice it was its ally and accom- 
 plice. For it is obvious that if there are two 
 men, one of whom is always telling a brigand 
 that he has a right to anything he can grasp and 
 hold, while another is always telling victims of 
 the brigand that it is wrong to resist brigandage 
 or that it is much more profitable in the long run 
 to avoid it by paying blackmail, then, however 
 different the opinions of these men may seem to 
 be, it is obvious that the effect which their action 
 tends to produce is the same effect, namely, the 
 profit of the brigand. 
 
 Palmerston and Louis Napoleon, though cer- 
 tainly neither of them Pacifists, had to allow for 
 an element of Pacifism in the public opinion on 
 which they relied, had always to reckon with it, 
 often to compromise with it, sometimes to yield 
 to it. It was the boast of Cobden and his school 
 that they prevented active intervention on behalf 
 of Denmark, and the unprepared state in which 
 the war of 1870 found the French defences was 
 partly due to the fear which the Emperor had 
 begun to feel of the Pacifist element which had 
 already made its appearance in the new Chamber. 
 
 If this was the case even before 1870, it was 
 
68 The Prussian Hath Said in His Heart 
 
 of course, far more so after that date. The hold 
 of Pacifism on the most obvious possible rivals 
 of the new German Empire grew steadily greater. 
 As the British Government tended more and 
 more to become a pure plutocracy supported 
 by secret money payments, the Pacifist infiuence 
 gained strength : for many of the Pacifists, both 
 of the sentimental and of the calculating type, 
 were immensely rich. The enormous increase in 
 the power of cosmopolitan finance told in the 
 same direction, for the de-nationalized men who 
 ruled the money-market, though often favourable 
 to small wars of aggression against the weak, 
 dreaded the disturbance which a great war be- 
 tween equal European powers would cause. In 
 France the extreme Eepublican party, which im- 
 mediately after 1870 had been especially the 
 champion of militant patriotism, became infected 
 with the new doctrine, through its secret anti- 
 Christian societies and its alliance with the Jews, 
 and that doctrine seemed almost dominant po- 
 litically until the first shot fired in the Vosges 
 blew it away like smoke. 
 
 Meanwhile Prussia and its political theory 
 could now confront the world from the vantage 
 ground of complete and unchallengeable success. 
 Even Frederick the Great had been in no such 
 
The Worship of the Beast 69 
 
 position of acknowledged superiority, for the 
 peace which closed the Seven Years' War, though 
 it gave Prussia a legal title to her stolen booty, 
 had been of the nature of a compromise. Neither 
 side was crushed or left prostrate. Now, how- 
 ever, Prussia could claim that she had laid her 
 principal rivals in the dust and established for 
 herself a permanent dominion. Her victory over 
 Austria virtually made all Germans her subjects. 
 Her victory over France made all Europe believe 
 her invincible in war and therefore a proper ob- 
 ject of universal imitation. It may be well to 
 take the two points separately before consider- 
 ing their combined effect. 
 
 The Germans are a European people whose 
 peculiarities for good and evil are fairly well 
 known to those who have tried to analyse the 
 complex which we call Europe. They are a peo- 
 ple rather kindly and rather dreamy. They are 
 not natural warriors like the French, or natural 
 adventurers like the English. They have little 
 taste and little aptitude for self-government or 
 for those fierce political conflicts out of which 
 alone self-government can come. They are fond 
 of speculative thought, of musing freely on the 
 mystery of things, but lack the sharp edge and 
 decision of the Latin mind, which demands as 
 
70 The Prussian Hath Said in His Heart 
 
 the end of thought a final conclusion and a / 
 dogma. They specially love, and can create, 
 music. They are grave, sentimental and some- 
 what deficient in humour. 
 
 Such are the Germans. Of such certainly is 
 not the German Empire. The German Empire is 
 Prussian or, to speak perhaps more correctly, 
 Frederician. It is an enlargement for which the 
 original design of the Kingdom of Prussia sup- 
 plied the working model. Not until it is de- 
 stroyed will the Germans again be able to make 
 their contribution — an admittedly valuable con- 
 tribution — to European civilisation. 
 
 Theoretically the German Empire is federal, 
 and the King of Prussia merely happens also to 
 be German Emperor. In fact, the governing ma- 
 chine of Prussia dominates the whole of the 
 Germanics, and the means by which this domina- 
 tion is secured are essentially the same as those 
 which served to maintain the original Prussian 
 monarchy. The chief instrument in each case 
 has been the Army. 
 
 The army of the German Empire is not, of 
 course, of quite the same type as that which 
 Frederick commanded. It is not a professional, 
 but a conscript, army ; and in the ordinary way it 
 would be much more difficult to make of a con- 
 
The Worship of the Beast 71 
 
 script army an instrument fitted for the complete 
 control and subjugation of a people than if the 
 army constitutes a special class in the State. 
 
 In Germany, however, the thing has been done, 
 and the more carefully the present military sys- 
 tem of the empire is examined, the more we shall 
 see that that system is elaborately devised to 
 secure the great masses of armed men which 
 modem warfare requires without sacrificing that 
 quality of absolute and terrorized subservience 
 which the Prussian ideal even more urgently de- 
 mands. 
 
 Firstly, it is not true of the German Empire as 
 it is of the French Eepublic, that every man is a 
 trained soldier. The troops who have been sub- 
 jected to the severe and even savage discipline 
 which the Prussian military system demanded 
 and who constitute the real effective army of the 
 Empire, are drawn for practical purposes entirely 
 from the labouring class and mainly from the 
 rural labouring class. In all other classes ex- 
 emptions are always numerous. Those of the 
 wealthier classes who do not get off their service 
 altogether are allowed to serve in volunteer corps 
 under merely formal restrictions, living as they 
 choose and only bound to put in a certain number 
 of drills. It is the Prussian theory — we have 
 
72 The Prussian Hath Said in His Heart 
 
 seen it in action during this war — ^that such 
 practically untrained men could be made into 
 effective soldiers during the progress of a cam- 
 paign if brigaded with a sufficient number of 
 thoroughly disciplined troops. Moreover, the 
 size of the German population makes it possible 
 for the German commanders, without prejudice 
 to the political principle upon which this arrange- 
 ment was based, to put into the first line as many 
 effectives as France could provide after forcing 
 every able-bodied citizen into the ranks. 
 
 The army so formed was officered by men 
 drawn exclusively from the ruling class, still 
 mainly aristocratic, though containing a pluto- 
 cratic element. Promotion from the ranks was 
 unknown. The officer was always a man of a 
 certain station who had adopted a military career 
 as a profession. The all-important non-commis- 
 sioned officers, the sergeants, were also profes- 
 sional, though, of course, men of another class. 
 It was their special business to insure the disci- 
 pline and break the spirit of successive drafts of 
 conscripts. 
 
 For the essential character of Prussian dis- 
 ciplinary methods was in no way changed by the 
 transition from a professional to a conscript 
 army. Terror was still the single weapon used 
 
The Worship of the Beast 73 
 
 to enforce obedience, and it was and is still found 
 an effective one. Of its reaction on the efficiency 
 of the German soldier I shall speak later. Here 
 I only wish to emphasise the fact that the prin- 
 ciples upon which the German armies were and 
 are governed are still the same as the principles 
 upon which Frederick the Great relied when the 
 army of Prussia first became formidable to Eu- 
 rope. 
 
 An army so governed was evidently a most 
 effective defence not only against foreign but 
 against domestic enemies. With such an army 
 at its absolute disposal the Prussian Government 
 had certainly the less cause to care what the 
 theory of the Constitution might be. In theory, 
 as I have said, Prussia was only one State of 
 the Empire whose King happened to be its titular 
 head. In practice the Prussian ruling class 
 ruled the army, and the army ruled the Empire. 
 That class had as little cause to fear the Eeich- 
 stag as Frederick II had to fear libellers and mal- 
 contents. The iron discipline of the army and 
 the naturally un warlike character of the German 
 peoples was sufficient security. The army alone 
 could act, and the army would always act as the 
 King of Prussia directed. "They can say what 
 they like, but I can do — what I like." 
 
74 The Prussian Hath Said in His Heart 
 
 So much for the first cause of the successful 
 Prussian hegemony, which mainly affected Ger- 
 many. The second also had a great effect on the 
 smaller German States, but its effect on Europe 
 as a whole was hardly less. 
 
 When one examines impartially the military 
 victories of Prussia between 1860 and 1870, one 
 does not see that there was anything so very 
 extraordinary to boast about. Prussia in alli- 
 ance with Austria and with the backing of all the 
 minor German States, had succeeded in break- 
 ing the little Kingdom of Denmark. That, cer- 
 tainly, was no great achievement. Subsequently 
 Prussia had defeated Austria. In that campaign 
 Prussia had certainly shown that she was far 
 better prepared for war than her rival. But the 
 task was no very difficult one, and proved more 
 against the military elBficiency of Austria than 
 for the military prowess of Prussia. What af- 
 fected the public imagination was undoubtedly 
 the defeat of France, and the defeat of France 
 had undoubtedly about it a certain dramatic 
 quality. But if any one will compare it with 
 some of the historic wars of Christendom — ^with 
 some of the victories of France for instance, from 
 the days of Louis XIV to those of Napoleon — ^it 
 will not seem so enormous a thing. The fortune 
 
The Worship of the Beast 75 
 
 of war went against the French and Paris was 
 taken. Yet the French in their time have taken 
 nearly every capital in Europe, from Moscow to 
 Madrid, not excepting Berlin. What was there 
 about the German triumph which so peculiarly 
 and so much to its hurt impressed the mind of Eu- 
 rope? 
 
 I think that the answer may be found in a 
 temperamental peculiarity perhaps native to the 
 Germans which their Prussian rulers have as- 
 siduously encouraged — the trick of self-praise. 
 Even before their victory, and still more after it, 
 the Germans were taught to regard themselves 
 demonstrably superior to all their neighbours. 
 They believed it, and sooner or later their neigh- 
 bours came to believe it also. This was specially 
 the case in England. 
 
 In this country, indeed, the ground had already 
 been prepared for the acceptance of such a belief. 
 Long before 1870 we had contrived a method by 
 which in flattering the Germans we could also 
 flatter ourselves. The Germans were our " cous- 
 ins." They were our fellow "Teutons." If, 
 therefore, they were such fine fellows, there was 
 a presumption that we were fine fellows too. All 
 history was ransacked and distorted to support 
 this view of our relationship. The usual form 
 
76 The Prussian Hath Said in His Heart 
 
 which such distortion took was the laying of an 
 extravagant emphasis on the most obscure and 
 largely legendary part of our history, on those 
 dark and anarchic centuries when, as we con- 
 jecture, a certain (probably small) number of 
 North Sea pirates and revolted German mercen- 
 aries achieved a measure of political power and, 
 perhaps, a certain infusion of new blood in the 
 deserted province of Britain. Nay, it actually 
 became a part of English patriotism to prefer 
 this dingy and unattractive origin for our nation 
 to the grandeur of a highly civilised part of the 
 Koman Empire. The trick was worked by a 
 curious circular argument. If you doubted our 
 exclusively "Anglo-Saxon" origin you were asked 
 how you dared to deny the great, handsome, 
 valorous, freedom-lovingy woman-worshipping 
 Anglo-Saxons were our ancestors. If you replied 
 that you saw no particular reason to believe that 
 the Anglo-Saxons were any more great, hand- 
 some, valorous, and the rest than their neigh- 
 bours, and proceeded to point out that the Roman 
 legionaries from whom many of us may well be 
 descended had a certain reputation for valuable 
 military qualities, you were asked how you dared 
 to suggest that our noble Anglo-Saxon ancestors 
 were inferior to mere foreigners. Carlyle, a man 
 
The Worship of the Beast 77 
 
 of genius, instinctively hostile to the Latin spirit, 
 and full of an honourable enthusiasm for German 
 literature, lent the powerful aid of his vivid pen. 
 As Charlemagne had become Karl der Grosse 
 (his descent from a noble patrician house of Nar- 
 bonne being tactfully passed over), so such an 
 obvious Frenchman as William of Falaise be- 
 came, on the strength of the one sixty-fourth 
 part of Scandinavian blood which he may per- 
 haps have inherited, "the Crowned Northman." 
 How far all this was due to pseudo-science and 
 a crude interpretation of philology, how far to the 
 political alliance of England and Germany 
 against the Eevolution and Napoleon, how far to 
 a religious sympathy between the English and the 
 North Germans as the two principal peoples who 
 had, though at a different time and for different 
 reasons, rejected the Catholic Church, it would be 
 difficult to say. But it is certain that before 1870 
 Teutonism was predominant in England. The 
 war of 1870 confirmed its dominance, for therein 
 the legend so dear to Carlyle and Kingsley of the 
 triumphant Teuton and the vanquished Latin 
 was enacted under our own eyes. Of course, it 
 was a mere coincidence. The Germans won, not 
 because they were Teutons, but because at that 
 particular time they happened to have a better 
 
78 The Prussian Hath Said in His Heart 
 
 general, a better military organisation, and, 
 above all, better artillery. But the coincidence 
 was too marked not to make a profound impres- 
 sion on those already predisposed to find Teu- 
 tons efficient and Latins decadent. That im- 
 pression became an all but universal dogma, and 
 even survived the change of foreign policy which 
 made us the allies of the French and the antag- 
 onists of the German Empire. Nay, that change 
 was largely recommended to us on the ground 
 that it would be heartless to leave the poor 
 French who, being Latins,^were doomed to defeat, 
 to confront unaided the gigantic power of Ger- 
 many. It lasted down to the very moment of 
 war, and I cannot better illustrate its character 
 than by tating a book written just before the 
 outbreak of that war and published after the 
 author's death only the other day. 
 
 It is called Germany and England and con- 
 sists of lectures delivered by the late Professor 
 J. A. Cramb reprinted from his notes. It is de- 
 scribed on the cover as " A Reply to Bemhardi," 
 but this sub-title seems singularly inappropriate, 
 and I cannot but doubt whether Professor Oramb 
 would have accepted it as a fair description of 
 his work. So far from being a reply to Bem- 
 hardi, the book seems to me to be a whole-hearted 
 
The Worship of the Beast 79 
 
 welcome to Bernhardi, an enthusiastic endorse- 
 ment of Bernhardi, an embracing of Bernhardi's 
 beautiful big boots. All the silly nonsense that 
 Bernhardi talks, whenever he is dealing with 
 matters outside the immediate scope of his pro- 
 fession, is here reverently reproduced and humbly 
 accepted as a proper guide for the future develop- 
 ment of European civilisation. 
 
 Professor Oramb, as his introductory chapter 
 tells us, set before himself the true purpose of 
 every writer on contemporary history ; nor could 
 I improve on the words in which he defined it. 
 "What, then, is my purpose?" he asked. "I an- 
 swer in the words of a German historian, 'To 
 see things as in very deed they are.' " His 
 theory was excellent; his practice, I think, open 
 to criticism. 
 
 Recent events have enabled us to see both Ger- 
 many and Europe "as in very deed they are" more 
 clearly than was formerly possible. We can 
 safely say, for example, that the German Empire 
 at the time when Professor Cramb was writing, 
 possessed in reserve a very large and powerful 
 army, smaller than that of Eussia, but somewhat 
 larger than that of France — ^though it had not, 
 like France, given every able-bodied male a real 
 training in arms; that this army was perfectly 
 
80 The Prussian Hath Said in His Heart 
 
 equipped and prepared, so far as mechanical 
 means could prepare it, for the aggressive war 
 which the Prussian Government had long medi- 
 tated; that it was admirably disciplined so that 
 its members could be relied upon to carry out 
 systematically any commands given to them — 
 even to the extent of actions so repugnant to the 
 traditional military spirit as the killing of women 
 and small children ; that, on the other hand, these 
 troops suffered from some serious disadvantages, 
 as, for example, that they lacked the power of 
 personal initiative, that they could not be induced 
 to attack in other than close formation, that their 
 individual marksmanship was bad, and that they 
 were not able to confront anything like an equal 
 number of French or English soldiers in hand- 
 to-hand fighting with the bayonet; that Germany 
 had a siege artillery more powerful than any in 
 Europe, which was excellently served, and a con- 
 siderable superiority in niachine guns, while its 
 field artillery was inferior to that of France both 
 in quality and handling. Apart from military 
 matters, it might be said that a carefully and 
 patriotically devised fiscal system had assisted 
 the German Empire to a great industrial de- 
 velopment, not, however, without some loss to 
 vital interests, a peasant population having in 
 
The Worship of the Beast 81 
 
 many parts been converted into an urban prole- 
 tariat. It might quite safely be added that Prus- 
 sia (and Germany, so far as it was Prussianized) 
 had lost such power of thinking as it ever pos- 
 sessed, and had become altogether incapable of 
 literature and of the plastic arts. In these de- 
 partments it had little to offer but a choice be- 
 tween vulgar pomposity and equally vulgar and 
 generally somewhat perverted pornography. 
 
 That is a fair statement of the truth about 
 Prussianized Germany, "as indeed it is." Now 
 listen to the late Professor Cramb: — 
 
 And here let me say with regard to Germany that of 
 all England's enemies sHe is by far the greatest; and 
 by "greatness" I mean not merely magnitude, nor her 
 millions of soldiers, her millions of inhabitants ; I mean 
 grandeur of soul. She is the greatest and most heroic 
 enemy — if she is our enemy — that England, in the 
 thousand years of her history, has ever confronted. 
 In the sixteenth century we made war upon Spain, and 
 the Empire of Spain. But Germany in the twentieth 
 century is a greater power, greater in conception, in 
 all that makes for human dignity, than was the Spain 
 of Charles V and Philip II. In the seventeenth cen- 
 tury we fought against Holland; but the Germany of 
 Bismarck and the Kaiser is greater than the Holland 
 of De Witt, In the eighteenth century we fought 
 against France ; and, again, the Germany of to-day is 
 a higher, more august power thaji France under Louis 
 XIV. 
 
82 The Prussian Hath Said in His Heart 
 
 Well, sixteenth century Spain discovered 
 America. She conquered with a handful of men 
 all the southern part of that hemisphere. She 
 accomplished a miracle which had not been at- 
 tempted since the Roman Empire and which has 
 perhaps never been successfully attempted again ; 
 she welded a whole continent of barbaric tribes 
 into the civilisation of Europe so effectively that 
 that civilisation even survived her own downfall. 
 She also produced the pictures of Velasquez and 
 Murillo, the plays of L6pez and Calder6n, the 
 great satire of Cervantes. 
 
 The France of Louis XIV was not only the 
 greatest power in Europe in arms and diplomacy, 
 but incomparably the greatest in letters. She 
 could boast of the whole cycle of classical dram- 
 atists, of the comedies of Moli^re, of the philos- 
 ophy of Descartes, of the theology of Bossuet 
 and Pascal. The ruling class of Europe every- 
 where learnt her language, her code of manners, 
 her literary traditions. And Professor Cramb 
 says that the present German Empire surpasses 
 both not only in military resources but in 
 "grandeur of soul." She has produced the 
 17-inch Krupp howitzer, the materialist mythol- 
 ogy of Professor Haeckel, the Biblical fancies of 
 Professor Harnack, the public buildings of Ber- 
 
The Worship of the Beast 83 
 
 lin, several statues of Bismarck and the Kaiser 
 and a large output of pornographic picture post- 
 cards ! 
 
 Now, if you ask why Professor Oramb thought 
 of the German Empire in so extravagant a fash- 
 ion, why he thought the Germans such heroic fel- 
 lows, I think that a careful examination of his 
 book will prove that it was mainly because the 
 Germans said so, and the Professor thought that 
 they ought to know. At least, that is pretty well 
 all the evidence he adduces. But he was not 
 alone in his conviction. All England, and to a 
 great extent all Europe, lay for nearly half a 
 century under the spell of a sort of hypnotism : 
 the joint effect of Prussian victories and Prussian 
 self-glorification. 
 
 Before we consider, as we shall have to con- 
 sider in the next chapter, the effect of this on the 
 Germans themselves, it may be well to summarize 
 its effect upon Europe. It led to the general ac- 
 ceptance of certain doctrines which Prussia had 
 originated, and which in the triumph of Prussia 
 seemed to triumph. They may be set out fairly 
 succinctly. 
 
 (1) Political Materialism. — That all mat- 
 ters of politics, and especially all matters of war, 
 are matters of calculation. That personal valour 
 
84 The Prussian Hath Said in His Heart 
 
 counts for nothing. That the sense of personal 
 freedom and initiative counts for nothing. Above 
 all, that the energy created by the sense of fight- 
 ing in a just cause counts for nothing. That if 
 you add up the numbers and the quantity and 
 quality of armaments you can prophesy the re- 
 sult with virtual infallibility. It so happened 
 that in 1870 the Prussian calculations and 
 prophecies came out almost exactly right. Hence 
 the wide acceptance of the Prussian theory in 
 this matter. 
 
 (2) Predatory Imperialism. — This follows 
 from the last thesis. Since war is a matter of 
 calculation it is foolish for the weak to resist, 
 as it is natural for the strong to encroach. The 
 use of the word "Imperialism" may cause some 
 confusion, since that word has been used in this 
 country sometimes in the Prussian and some- 
 times in a wholly different sense. Many of us 
 have called ourselves Imperialists, meaning that 
 we wished to make the connection between this 
 country and the commonwealths and dominions 
 which British energy and the British spirit of 
 adventure have created throughout the world 
 closer and more effective. That has obviously 
 nothing to do with the doctrine stated above, with 
 which, however, our country by no means escaped 
 
The Worship of the Beast 85 
 
 infection during the long years of Prussian su- 
 premacy. 
 
 (3) The Denial of Right. — This, as we have 
 seen, was the original theory of Frederick the 
 Great, on which the whole policy of Prussia was 
 built. It certainly spread beyond the borders 
 of the German Empire. That strong men might 
 violate ordinary morals without oflEence, that 
 treaties might be broken and promises repudiated 
 by a nation bent on fulfilling its "Destiny" — these 
 ideas were widely canvassed. Even Bismarck's 
 forgery found defenders in England. 
 
 (4) The Efficiency of Servitude. — By this I 
 mean the theory, held to be more or less justified 
 by the issue of the Franco-Prussian War, that a 
 people is the more effective for military and other 
 purposes in proportion as it is reduced to a con- 
 dition of unquestioning obedience to the regula- 
 tions framed by their rulers. In other words, 
 that the way to make a strong nation is to make 
 a servile people. This essential Prussian con- 
 ception is one to which I have referred only in- 
 cidentally in these pages, and which in view of 
 the extent to which it has permeated the thought 
 of Europe, deserves more careful exposition. 
 
 Matthew Arnold in the most fascinating of all 
 his books. Friendship's Qarlcmd notes a con- 
 
86 The Prussian Hath Said in His Heart 
 
 temporary reference to "the complete subordina- 
 tion to the State" of the Prussians of 1870, and 
 puts it forward as the explanation of their vic- 
 tories and a subject for English emulation. 
 Arnold's object was, of course, to oppose the 
 crude industrial anarchism of the dominant 
 Manchester School, with which he was always 
 and rightly at war. But it is not a little curious 
 that he should have fallen blindly into the very 
 materialism — the "boundless faith in machinery" 
 — against which he was always warning others. 
 He could see that "liberty and publicity" might 
 only mean "liberty to make fools of yourselves 
 and publicity to tell all the world that you are 
 doing so." He could see that the value of self- 
 government depended in part at least on whether 
 the "best self" of men was governing. But he 
 could not apparently see — at least not at that mo- 
 ment — that whether it was good or bad that men 
 should be completely subordinated to the State 
 depended on what kind of State it was to which 
 they were subordinated. 
 
 Now the subordination of the Prussians to the 
 State had nothing in common with the Eoman 
 religion of civic patriotism or the high Kepubli- 
 can enthusiasm of 1793 which suffered the Con- 
 scription and the Terror that it might save 
 
The Worship of the Beast 87 
 
 France from the stranger. It was not even of 
 the same type as that loyalty to one sacramental 
 man as embodying the nation which inspired the 
 Cavaliers and Jacobites of England, which made 
 the French monarchy, and which still, in spite of 
 a thousand errors and crimes, unites the Eussians 
 to their Tsar. It did not mean the fusing of the 
 whole people into a conscious nation. It was 
 purely servile. 
 
 It would be absurd to attribute the whole drift 
 of Europe towards the revival of slavery and 
 the influence of Prussia. Mr. Hilaire Belloc has 
 demonstrated with admirable lucidity in his 
 Servile State that it is the inevitable form of 
 stable equilibrium for a society in which the 
 wealth is concentrated in a few hands and the 
 mass of men are proletarian, unless that society 
 can find within itself the energy necessary for 
 redistribution. But Prussian supremacy un- 
 doubtedly helped the movement of all industrial 
 Europe in that direction, firstly, because Prussia 
 was the country in which the Christian tradition 
 was weakest, and consequently the return to the 
 slave-basis of society which the Faith had de- 
 stroyed, easiest; secondly because it was the coun- 
 try in which the new organisation of the social 
 system on a servile basis had been pushed near- 
 
88 The Prussian Hath Said in His Heart 
 
 est completion; and thirdly (and this was what 
 counted for most) because the Prussians could 
 point to the unchallengeable fact of military vic- 
 tory, a victory attributed by themselves and also 
 by many foreign observers to the "discipline," 
 that is to say the servility, of their social rela- 
 tions. 
 
 The consequence was that for forty years or 
 more almost every attempt made in Europe to 
 deal with the problems which we call "social" 
 was made on Prussian lines and tended towards 
 the clear Prussian objective — the division of all 
 citizens into two classes — free and unfree. 
 Lloyd George's Insurance Act — the biggest step 
 taken towards the Servile State in England — ^was 
 avowedly borrowed in its essentials from Prussia, 
 and the attempt to introduce a similar system in 
 France, after having been passed by the Chamber 
 and blessed by M. Jaur^s and the leading Social- 
 ists, was defeated only by that popular resistance 
 which the French are always ready to offer to 
 laws that have no sanction from the national 
 will. For many years every person interested in 
 "Social Keform" (which our more simple fathers 
 called "the Oppression of the Poor" ) has always 
 been able to secure a hearing for his nasty project 
 by calling it "the Schultsmann System" or 
 
The Worship of the Beast 89 
 
 "tte Guggenheimer System," or by pointing to 
 the bright examples of Jena or Kopenick or 
 Hesse-Darmstadt. And all these projects, even 
 when ostentatiously fathered by professed Social- 
 ists, have had two things in common. They have 
 been servile in their ultimate basis and assump- 
 tion, and they have contained some insult to hu- 
 man dignity, which is the image of God. 
 
CHAPTER V 
 
 THE NEMESIS 
 
 Dante, I think, says somewhere of the Souls in 
 Hell, that, being cut off from the source of Eter- 
 nal Eeason, they are unable to philosophise. 
 The same is true of Prussians. 
 
 A friend of mine once showed me an insane and 
 entertaining book called Breaks which bore the 
 even more entertaining subtitle: "Being the 
 Falsifications of the One Thought of Frater Per- 
 durabo, which Thought is Itself Untrue." That 
 phrase suggests an excellent summary of what the 
 Prussians call "German Culture." It consists of 
 Falsifications of the One Thought of Frederick 
 Hohenzollern, which Thought is Itself Untrue. 
 
 The one thought of Frederick II was, of course, 
 that there was no God, and that, in consequence, 
 men had no moral responsibility. Now that 
 thought is untrue; but it has another character 
 which deserves notice. It is essentially a de- 
 structive and barbaric thought, a thought which 
 
 makes all further thought unnecessary and im- 
 
 90 
 
The Nemesis 91 
 
 possible, for clearly if there is no meaning in the 
 Universe it is waste of time to enquire what it 
 means, and if men may do just what they choose 
 it is futile to discuss what they ought to do. The 
 thought of Frederick, therefore, permitted of no 
 true development, but only of falsification. The 
 Prussians could rhetoricize about it; but they 
 could not think about it, for there was nothing to 
 think about. 
 
 I put this point first in my attempt to analyse 
 the process by which Prussia approached the sui- 
 cide which we are now witnessing, because it is 
 the keynote of that process. The Prussians de- 
 liberately neglected the soul (in which Frederick 
 the Great did not believe), and consequently in 
 everything connected with the soul their work 
 was simply bad of its kind. Their painting was 
 bad painting, their architecture bad architecture, 
 their music bad music. Especially was their 
 thinking to the eyes of civilised men, bad think- 
 ing. Like the Damned, they were cut off from 
 the source of Eternal Eeason and could not philo- 
 sophise. 
 
 Palmerston is said to have called Germany "a 
 country of damned professors," and he was 
 severely rebuked by Arnold and others for this 
 illiberal sentiment. But Palmerston was largely 
 
92 The Prussian Hath Said in His Heart 
 
 right, as such men are often right about essen- 
 tials. The Germans are certainly not wiser or 
 more learned or more concentrated on things of 
 the mind than other peoples ; but they do seem to 
 regard the mere title of Professor, quite apart 
 from anything the particular man has to teach, 
 with a mysterious veneration. The fame of Prus- 
 sia's immense output of professors spread 
 through Germany, and from Germany to all Eu- 
 rope, and especially to England. The professors, 
 as any one with a reasonable degree of culture 
 and intelligence could see, were in many cases 
 fools ; but that apparently did not matter. 
 
 There was a man called Haeckel. He had at- 
 tained some legitimate distinction as a careful 
 student of the habits of the lower invertebrates, 
 especially of jelly fish and sponges. On the 
 strength of this he wrote a number of books in 
 support of a creed of crude and dogmatic Ma- 
 terialism. There was nothing in them that had 
 not been said much more persuasively by Lucre- 
 tius nearly two thousand years before. , The only 
 part of his work which could be regarded as in 
 any way original was a complicated mythology 
 wholly unconnected with any kind of evidence, in- 
 cluding a Pedigree of Man, made up entirely out 
 of his own head and possessing rather less scien- 
 
The Nemesis 93 
 
 tific authority than the ancestries of the Homeric 
 gods and heroes. But Haeckel was a German 
 professor, and throughout Germany and to a 
 great extent throughout Europe his ridiculous 
 book was accepted as the last word in "Free 
 Thought." 
 
 Harnack had even less to offer than Haeckel. 
 He had nothing so definite and intelligible as Ma- 
 terialism to preach. All that he had to say was 
 that he liked some parts of the Gospels and dis- 
 liked others; and that he was quite sure that 
 Jesus Christ was responsible for the parts he 
 liked but not for the parts he disliked. The 
 parts he liked were, of course, those which 
 could be twisted into a plea for cowardice. The 
 parts he disliked were those which affirmed such 
 inconvenient doctrines as the Being of God, Mir- 
 acle and a Supernatural Authority by which man 
 could be judged. Harnack was by no means 
 without scholarship, but his knowledge of Greek 
 had no relation to his conclusions, which were ad- 
 mittedly based on his conception of the "psy- 
 chology" of the principal Figure. Whenever Our 
 Lord was reported as having spoken or acted 
 otherwise than as a Prussian professor might 
 have been expected to speak or act under the cir- 
 cumstances, he scented an "interpolation." Pro- 
 
94 The Prussian Hath Said in His Heart 
 
 fessor Hamack has recently been making 
 speeches about England. Any one reading them 
 can form a very representative idea of the sort of 
 evidence and logic upon which he was formerly 
 asked to deny his God. 
 
 Then there was Treitschke. Treitschke was 
 an historian. He had only one subject, the mag- 
 nificence of himself and his fellow Prussians and 
 the inferiority to them of the rest of mankind. 
 Of this historical accuracy one may judge from a 
 sample quoted by Professor Gramb from one of 
 his hysterical diatribes against this country. 
 England, he informs us, has only a mercenary 
 army and has never had a national army except 
 under Cromwell. Even Englishmen, who are not 
 as a rule well-instructed in history, know that 
 Cromwell's success was mainly due to the supe- 
 riority of his very highly paid professional army 
 over the old national militia. But Treitschke 
 was also a Professor, and as such received the un- 
 bounded homage of Bernhardi in Germany and of 
 Professor Cramb in this country. 
 
 Yet the breakdown of German thought which 
 followed on the Prussianization of Germany can- 
 not be illustrated adequately except by seeing it 
 in relation to a man very different from these 
 platitudinous barbarians, a man of wayward, 
 
The Nemesis 95 
 
 perverse and unbalanced, but unquestionable 
 genius, — Friedrich Nietzsche. 
 
 Nietzsche was not a Prussian. He was a Pole ; 
 but a more or less Prussianized Pole, standing in 
 something of the same relation to the two peoples 
 as, say, Mr. Bernard Shaw stands to the English 
 arid the Irish. Such men are usually a little con- 
 temptuous of the illusions often engendered by 
 patriotism. They have little faith in the aspira- 
 tions and longings of the nation from which they 
 spring ; they have a measureless contempt for the 
 boastful folly of their oppressors. Such a man 
 was Nietzsche. Though he has been acclaimed as 
 the chief prophet of Prussian Immoralism and 
 even held responsible (by an exaggeration which 
 yet contains a measure of truth), for the errors 
 and crimes of modem Prussian policy, he hated 
 and despised the Prussians. 
 
 It would be interesting to speculate in the case 
 of Nietzsche (as in that of Mr. Shaw) on what he 
 might have become if he had inherited that re- 
 ligion which is the soul of Poland as it is of Ire- 
 land. But he missed that great influence as he 
 largely missed the influence of nationality. He 
 had nothing on which to feed his flaming and 
 towering imagination except the dregs of Darwin- 
 ism, which were interpreted by Prussian philos- 
 
96 The Prussian Hath Said in His Heart 
 
 ophers as a crude Materialism, and by Prussian 
 moralists and politicians as a justification of 
 egotism and oppression. 
 
 I have spoken of this dingy culture as the food 
 of his imagination rather than as the foundation 
 of his creed ; for in truth Nietzsche had no creed. 
 You cannot get from him any consecutive philoso- 
 phy ; and you can quote him on almost every side 
 of every question. He could not reason coher- 
 ently on a Darwinian or any other basis. His 
 most characteristic aphorism : "Nothing is true, 
 everything is permissible," obviously puts an end 
 to all reasoning. He often saw neglected truths, 
 as did Carlyle, by a flash of instinct apparently 
 unconnected with any process of logic. What is 
 truest in his teaching may perhaps be best ex- 
 pressed in words which are not his, but belong to 
 another great phrase maker, Robert Louis Steven- 
 son: — "This civilisation of ours is a dingy un- 
 gentlemanly business ; it drops so much out of a 
 man." Though, like Stevenson, an invalid (per- 
 haps because of that misfortune) , he had real en- 
 thusiasm for heroism and for the great human 
 epic of arms. He had a wonderful art, a start- 
 ling gift of vivid and pungent phrases ("Men do 
 not really desire happiness ; only Englishmen do 
 that") and he was an admirable rhetorician. 
 
The Nemesis 97 
 
 But above all he was a poet, with an imagination 
 which could so vivify and transfigure his material 
 as to produce not a feebly depressing mythology 
 like Haeckel's pedigrees, but a Great Myth, a 
 thing which, however irrational, men could wor- 
 ship — the Superman. 
 
 This fancy of a creature to be evolved from 
 Man which should eclipse Man as Man had 
 eclipsed the lower animals, is not, as I say, a 
 logical deduction from any possible theoiy of 
 Evolution. If Man is to be considered simply as 
 one of the animals, and we are accordingly to 
 expect him to be supplanted, it is not, on the 
 analogy of the past, probable that he will be sup- 
 planted by his own evolved offspring. Man was 
 not, according to Darwin, the descendant of the 
 Monstrous Eft that was lord of valley and hill, 
 but of some insignificant creature that was hop- 
 ping about between its toes, and if "Man is a crea- 
 ture that must be surpassed," it would seem on 
 the same analogy that he is more likely to be ex- 
 terminated by some preternaturally intelligent 
 toad or by some creature resembling Mr. Wells' 
 Martians. Nietzsche's conception was a purely 
 imaginative one. Such as it was, he used it as a 
 fantastic argument for aristocracy. The many 
 must be utterly and ruthlessly sacrificed to the 
 
98 The Prussian Hath Said in His Heart 
 
 few, because from the few the Superman would be 
 bom. 
 
 It was the weakness of Nietzsche as a thinker 
 that he could never answer a plain question, and 
 one of the elementary questions he never an- 
 swered was, who were the "few," the potential 
 fathers of the Superman, to whom the many were 
 to be sacrificed. But as it happened, there was 
 one group of men in Europe that had no difiSculty 
 at all in supplying the answer. This was the rul- 
 ing caste of Prussia. When they discovered 
 Nietzsche, after a long neglect, they were, we may 
 imagine, quite incapable of understanding nine- 
 tenths of what he said. But the part about the 
 New Aristocracy was clear. "He says," we may 
 suppose them saying, "that they are Brave ; that 
 they are Beautiful ; that they are Incomparably 
 Wise; that they are Ever Victorious. Who can 
 this mean but Us? Are We not Brave and Beau- 
 tiful and Wise and Victorious? Have We not 
 told each other so for many years? Therefore 
 We are the Master Class and the predestined an- 
 cestors of the Superman. And therefore the rest 
 of mankind exist only as means to Our end, as 
 servile material for Us to use." 
 
 It must have been maddening for poor Nietzs- 
 che to have his Superman identified with the 
 
The Nemesis 99 
 
 Prussian Junker. It was like asking Mr. Shaw 
 to recognise him in Thomas Broadbent. Perhaps 
 it really drove him mad. Anyhow, he died in an 
 asylum. 
 
 And yet, in truth, it was the people who locked 
 Nietzsche up who deserved that fate at least as 
 much as he. For the man who thinks thus of 
 himself, who sees himself as patently superior to 
 all other men, and who even persuades himself 
 that other men so see him, is mad. He may com- 
 mand armies, he may bring huge guns into the 
 field, his palace may overtop all the palaces of the 
 world. But he is mad. He is suffering from de- 
 lusions. He is seeing the thing that is not there. 
 For him there is in the long run no crown but the 
 crown of straw with which Peer Gynt was at last 
 crowned Emperor of Himself in the Egyptian 
 madhouse. For him at the last there is no palace 
 save the padded cell. 
 
 That the history of Prussia after 1870 was 
 simply the history of a whole nation going slowly 
 and systematically mad was not apparent for 
 many years, but it was not long before one fact 
 appeared : the fact that the Prussian, though he 
 might raid and conquer and annex, could not 
 govern. 
 
 To so govern a people of different blood and 
 
100 The Prussian Hath Said in His Heart 
 
 traditions from your own that they accept your 
 rule, and even come to feel conscious attachment 
 to it, is no easy task, but the thing can be done 
 and has been done. The Romans did it with 
 every people they ruled, except one, and that one 
 the mysterious race which no Empire has been 
 able to absorb, the Jews. The Spaniards did it 
 in South America. The English have done it, at 
 least to some extent, in India. The striking ex- 
 ample of its success is Alsace, where scarcely 
 more than two centuries ago — only about a cen- 
 tury ago as regards Mulhouse — the French took 
 over the rule of a German-speaking people and in 
 a few generations made them so passionately 
 loyal to France that their loyalty holds firm to- 
 day after forty years of enforced separation. To 
 no nation that cannot act thus can conquest and 
 Empire bring any permanent advantage. 
 
 To the Prussian ruler such action is perma- 
 nently impossible; he cannot even see why it 
 should be attempted. His own government is 
 based on force and nothing else. By force and 
 nothing else he seeks to impose it on others. If 
 he meets a steady resistance of the popular will 
 which force cannot overcome, then — more force. 
 The consequence is that every foreign population 
 which Prussia seeks to rule is in a state of chronic 
 
The Nemesis 101 
 
 convulsion and suppressed civil war. All sen- 
 sible Englishmen regard our mismanagement of 
 Ireland as the worst blot on our record for states- 
 manship and humanity. Well, the Prussian pos- 
 sessions are all Irelands, eighteenth-century Ire- 
 lands, Irelands of the days of the pitch-cap and 
 the Penal Laws. It is not a question of re- 
 ligion or of race. The Lutheran Danes of Schles- 
 wig, the German speaking population of Alsace, 
 are as far from being reconciled to their masters 
 as the Catholic Slavs of Posen. 
 
 From this Prussian limitation Bismarck him- 
 self was far from exempt. When he dealt with 
 foreign affairs he was dealing with something he 
 thoroughly understood. He had a just apprecia- 
 tion of the main elements in the European situa- 
 tion, the military temper of the French, the ele- 
 ments of weakness in the Hapsburg Empire, the 
 immense resources of Eussia and her invulnera- 
 bility to invasion, the naval strength and colonial 
 policy of England. But he had no comprehen- 
 sion of the spiritual forces which build up the 
 soul of a people, and his attempts to defeat such 
 forces by whips, bayonets, espionage and legal 
 chicane landed him in a series of blunders which 
 have already almost undone his life's work. 
 
 He first blundered into a quarrel with the 
 
102 The Prussian Hath Said in His Heart 
 
 Catholic Church, then enjoying one of her peri- 
 odical resurrections of vitality. It is curious to 
 contrast the skill which Bismarck showed in 
 dealing with temporal powers with his utter in- 
 ability to understand the nature of the power 
 with which he had now to deal. There was in 
 him nothing of that wisdom which made Napo- 
 leon say : "Treat with the Pope as if he were at 
 the head of three hundred thousand soldiers." 
 He utterly misunderstood the whole situation. 
 He mistook the mutiny of a few negligible profes- 
 sors for a great schism. He thought that the 
 "Old Catholic" movement, the utter insignifi- 
 cance and early decay of which only emphasised 
 the unanimous acclamation with which the whole 
 Catholic world greeted the Decree of Infallibility, 
 was a thing like the Reformation. He thought 
 that the Catholic bishops and priests of South 
 Germany, whose loyalty to the See of St. Peter 
 was traditional, could be manoeuvred into schism 
 by a parliamentary intrigue. The follies and 
 petty persecutions of the Kulturkampf and the 
 Falk Laws nearly split the Empire at its incep- 
 tion. Bismarck only saved it by an abject and 
 ignominious surrender, by accepting humbly the 
 terms dictated by the ecclesiastical authorities. 
 The policy which was to have made an end for 
 
The Nemesis 103 
 
 ever of the clerical power in Germany resulted 
 in the establishment of clericalism in its least de- 
 sirable sense more firmly in the Catholic prov- 
 inces of the Empire than in any other part of 
 Europe. Never since the days of Gregory VII 
 had there been such a Canossa. 
 
 Thus, at the cost of bitter personal humiliation, 
 did Bismarck keep Bavaria and the Ehine Prov- 
 inces. But in Prussian Poland, where there was 
 a national and racial as well as a religious quar- 
 rel, the old futile weapons of coercion were re- 
 furbished and applied with a new ruthlessness. 
 It was resolved to deprive the Poles of their land, 
 and a "Colonisation Committee" was appointed 
 and armed with all sorts of arbitrary and coercive 
 powers with the object of substituting Prussians 
 for Poles throughout the Polish Provinces. The 
 conspiracy was met by a counter conspiracy of 
 the type with which Ireland has made us familiar. 
 The Poles, in accordance with Pamell's famous 
 advice, "kept a firm grip on their farms and home- 
 steads" ; and Bismarck's policy utterly failed to 
 accomplish its end. The most it did was to scat- 
 ter a part of the Polish population over the sur- 
 face of the Prussian Empire, where every Polish 
 family formed a nucleus of disaffection and a 
 source of peril. An attempt to suppress the 
 
104 The Prussian Hath Said in His Heart 
 
 Polish language, though carried out with infa- 
 mous cruelty, failed as completely as the attempt 
 to expropriate the Polish peasantry. Prussian 
 Poland remained Polish; and Silesia and West 
 Prussia became more predominantly Polish every 
 year. 
 
 What happened in Poland happened with vari- 
 ations in Schleswig, in Alsace and in Lorraine. 
 And in all these conquered provinces the Prus- 
 sian rule became more abominable and more un- 
 successful as the minds of the Prussian ruling 
 class became increasingly subject to that disease 
 or perversion which it is my aim in this chapter 
 to describe. 
 
 Of that disease the first and most obvious 
 symptom was that of which I have already spoken. 
 It was illusion. We have seen that the Prussians 
 gained much in prestige by their habit of con- 
 stant and ritual self-praise, and it is probable 
 that in the beginning this habit was deliberately 
 encouraged by cynical rulers, who were under no 
 illusion themselves. Nay, even down to the out- 
 break of the present war, it is probable that the 
 rulers of Prussia, who were necessarily better ac- 
 quainted with the facts than they allowed their 
 subjects to be, were proportionately less under 
 the influence of mere swagger than they. The 
 
The Nemesis 105 
 
 idea was that this sort of swagger, if thoroughly 
 impressed on the public mind, strengthens a na- 
 tion, enabling it at once to speak with greater 
 authority and to act with greater confidence and 
 unity. Nor can it be denied that to an extent 
 these advantages were achieved by the German 
 Empire. But they were achieved at the price of 
 the nation's sanity and ultimately of the sanity 
 of the rulers themselves. As the world and the 
 nature of man are built you cannot play with 
 truth in that fashion. Self -admiration becomes 
 at last a mere disease of the mind; it takes no ac- 
 count even of the evidence of the senses. It 
 makes the suflferer altogether incapable of facing 
 facts or of dealing with men. The infection 
 spreads to the rulers themselves. They are given 
 over to strong delusion that they may believe a 
 lie. The astounding blunders of this year which 
 have hurried Prussia to her final ruin represent 
 the vengeance which truth takes upon her ene- 
 mies, and the just punishment of the cynicism 
 whereby the former generations of Prussian 
 statesmen thought to secure themselves by prac- 
 tising on the credulity of mankind. 
 
 Another hurt that her delusion did to Prussia 
 was to snap utterly that subtle but indispensable 
 bond between man and man which we call 
 
106 The Prussian Hath Said in His Heart 
 
 "honour." I am not thinking only of broken 
 pledges and violated engagements. The ruin of 
 honour involved in the Prussian conception goes 
 much deeper than that. The old European idea 
 of honour, like all the good things which Europe 
 has produced, rests ultimately upon the recogni- 
 tion of the spiritual equality of men. Men as 
 such owe certain things to each other. And the 
 obligations in every case, whether of keeping 
 promises or of fighting duels, are reciprocal. 
 That is honour. And without its strict authority 
 it is impossible either to treat with men or to fight 
 them. In both connections the Prussian has 
 simply forgotten what the thing means. 
 
 Take any of the most dubious and debatable 
 institutions with which the idea of honour has 
 connected itself. Take the duel. When an Eng- 
 lish gentleman of the eighteenth century said, or 
 a French gentleman of to-day says, that his 
 honour compels him to fight a duel, he means that 
 he owes it to his claim to equal humanity to show 
 that he is not more afraid than his antagonist of 
 being hurt or killed. He does not mean that he 
 owes it to his guperhumanity to show that he can- 
 not be hurt or killed ; for if he really could not be 
 hurt or killed the whole business would become 
 a disgusting and dastardly murder and would be 
 
The Nemesis 107 
 
 recognised at once as such by the most dissolute 
 bravo that ever provoked quarrels to show off his 
 courage. 
 
 But when the Prussian officer swaggers along 
 Unter den Linden or the Kaiserstrasse elbowing 
 women and civilians off the pavements, he is not 
 provoking quarrels to show his courage; he is 
 provoking quarrels to show what he would per- 
 haps call his supremacy, what I should call his 
 immunity, which is much the same thing as say- 
 ing his cowardice. Take this historic and well- 
 authenticated case. A Prussian officer insults a 
 young lady at a ball. Her betrothed very prop- 
 erly strikes him. Thereupon he draws his sabre 
 and cuts his unarmed assailant down. His con- 
 duct is promptly approved by a military tribunal. 
 Let it be noted that I am not blaming the man for 
 provoking a fight, but for preventing a fight and 
 substituting a most unmilitary outrage. 
 
 It is impossible that a state of mind which 
 makes such things possible should not have its 
 effect on the military spirit of a nation. In all 
 healthy European nations the soldier has ever 
 been specially reverenced, and very rightly so, for 
 he is the sacrificial man, the man set apart to be 
 slain if the need of the nation demands his life. 
 But the German soldier is reverenced not because 
 
108 The Prussian Hath Said in His Heart 
 
 he is killed but because he kills, — ^kills any one 
 or anything, unarmed men, wounded men, old 
 men, men with their hands tied behind them, 
 women, and children. 
 
 A Prussian officer at Saveme in Alsace, hav- 
 ing been, as he alleged, laughed at by an unarmed 
 civilian who was also a cripple, drew a sabre and 
 hacked at him. He also was acquitted by a court- 
 martial. Now these facts themselves might point 
 to no more than a lamentable loss of self-control 
 on the part of an ofiflcer and an ever more lament- 
 able lack of impartiality on the part of other of- 
 ficers. The original outrage might be due only to 
 blind, ungovernable fury. The subsequent ac- 
 quittal might be due only to blind, professional 
 esprit de corps. But this officer was not merely 
 acquitted. He was hailed as a heroic soldier by 
 all the militarist papers of the Empire. He was 
 specially saluted by the Crown Prince of Prussia. 
 What wonder that we find the same royal and im- 
 perial personage, when military exigencies com- 
 pel him to occupy a French country house, taking 
 the opportunity to steal the spoons? The one act 
 is about as military as the other. 
 
 It should be observed that here again theire is 
 nothing specially humanitarian about my criti- 
 cism. I do not blame the Prussian officer for 
 
The Nemesis 109 
 
 fighting and killing. I blame Mm for killing 
 without fighting, for substituting for a fight what 
 he would doubtless call a punishment. Even if 
 the punishment were just, my attitude towards 
 him and still more towards those who specially 
 singled him out for admiration and applause, 
 would be much the same. He had, at the very 
 best, abandoned the most honourable of all pro- 
 fessions, that of a soldier, for the basest of all 
 trades, that of an executioner ; and his brother of- 
 ficers seem to have thought that it did him credit ! 
 It is but a short step to considering the soldier's 
 work less glorious than that of the hangman who 
 (if that be the test) certainly kills with greater 
 certitude and celerity. 
 
 In such a fashion does the Prussian creed, the 
 "Master Morality," corrupt the military spirit in 
 the higher branches of its service. In the lower 
 branches the distinctive "Slave Morality" in- 
 tended for those who are to obey, corrupts it no 
 less. It is of the essence of a soldier that he 
 should obey, obey unhesitatingly, without ques- 
 tioning or after-thought. But it is also of Ms 
 essence — ^it is the thing which separates him from 
 the slave and makes the necessary loss of natural 
 liberty a glorious sacrifice — ^in that he should 
 obey from loyalty and not from fear. Now it is 
 
110 The Prussian Hath Said in His Heart 
 
 the essence of the Prussian conception of soldier- 
 ing that fear and fear alone should be the weapon 
 used. The soldier is to be cowed into an un- 
 natural courage, as men very wretched and 
 broken spirited will dare even suicide because it 
 seems less terrible than any other alternative. 
 Up to a point the trick will succeed and has suc- 
 ceeded. Your slave-soldiery, lashed in the face if 
 they fail to salute with sufficient promptitude, 
 will be prodigies of discipline. If sufficiently un- 
 intelligent they will even, if they can be kept to- 
 gether, face losses from which the bravest free 
 soldiers would shrink. But even from the purely 
 military point of view you will note disadvan- 
 tages. Their shooting will not be first rate, for 
 though you can frighten a man into firing off his 
 gun, you cannot frighten him into shooting 
 straight. They will dislike and avoid hand to 
 hand fighting. It will be difficult to get them to 
 advance in other than close formation, for when 
 the individual soldier ceases to be part of your 
 machine his nerve will fail. Personal initiative 
 he will necessarily lack, and, man to man, he will 
 be no match for his antagonist. And, as a mat- 
 ter of fact, all these inferiorities, though partly 
 compensated for by a carefully perfected organi- 
 sation, may be discovered in the German forces as 
 
The Nemesis 111 
 
 compared with their opponents. Of the loss of 
 honour and of the dignity of the soul I do not 
 speak, for the Prussian does not recognise it as a 
 drawback. But it counts for something in the 
 long run. 
 
 Finally there is another inevitable consequence 
 of the Prussian creed of egotism and the Prussian 
 denial of morals. They produce perversion. On 
 the most obvious and most unsavoury aspect of 
 this, it is fortunately not necessary to dwell. I 
 note it as I noted it in the case of Frederick II 
 himself. The Eulenberg scandals are not yet for- 
 gotten. Doubtless there are such abominations 
 to be found among the rich of all great European 
 cities, but only in Prussia are they the subject of 
 a recognised cultus, supported by a professional 
 crusade. It is from Berlin that there proceeds 
 that stream of ludicrous and nauseating "scien- 
 tific" works where unnatural horrors such as are 
 buried under the waters of the Dead Sea, are, as 
 Mr. Bernard Shaw has admirably expressed it, 
 "grotesquely worshipped as the stigmata of 
 genius." If such books occasionally make their 
 appearance in England, they appear somewhat 
 secretively. Their prominence or wide sale 
 would excite universal anger and disgust. It 
 would probably produce riots. Mr. Edward Oar- 
 
112 The Prussian Hath Said in His Heart 
 
 penter, one of the very few misguided imitators of 
 the German professors in this country (his little 
 book is full of quotations from Ulrichs, Krafft- 
 Ebing, Moll, Hirschfeld and the rest), remarks on 
 the "neglect" of the propaganda here as com- 
 pared with its popularity in Germany. In Ger- 
 many, or at any rate in Prussia, professors hold- 
 ing and continuing to hold high public and aca- 
 demic posts, men patronised and honoured by the 
 State, vie with each other in eulogising and apolo- 
 gising for the infamy. One of these degenerates, 
 a certain Dr. Moll, Professor of Psychology at 
 Berlin, who, as I gather from Mr. Edward Car- 
 penter's book, has received a sort of vote of 
 thanks from the perverts of Berlin — that numer- 
 ous and presumably influential body — seems to 
 have been selected by the Prussian Government 
 to report upon "the psychology of the Belgian 
 people !" 
 
 Such nastiness may, for the purposes of this 
 book, be left out of account. But it is impossible 
 to leave out of account the other kind of perver- 
 sion — the perversion of cruelty. 
 
 Man is so made that you cannot twist his moral 
 instincts without bruising and warping them, 
 without producing something in the soul anal- 
 ogous to mortification in an injured limb. The 
 
The Nemesis 113 
 
 Prussian rulers deliberately taught their subjects 
 to disregard obligations, the recognition of which 
 is natural to man. They did more than this : in 
 the case of those of their subjects on whose work 
 their State especially reposed — the members of 
 their armed forces — they inculcated the disregard 
 not only of the normal human conscience, but 
 of those feelings which are the particular spur 
 and impulse of the profession of arms. They 
 taught their officers to disown honour and their 
 soldiers to be afraid. You cannot do a thing like 
 this without producing a perversion and a dis- 
 ease in the soul, and the most characteristic form 
 which that perversion or disease is likely to take 
 is cruelty. 
 
 Cruelty, when occasion might require it, was in- 
 deed a necessary part of the Prussian system, but 
 it was the whole mistake of the Prussian theory — ■ 
 a part of its fundamental Atheism — that it should 
 have imagined that the thing could stop there, 
 that men could be trained to be cruel when they 
 were told and kind when they were told. The ef- 
 fect was, of course, that the mere lust of cruelty 
 became a primary passion with the Prussians. 
 It would not be difficult to find illustrations from 
 the conduct of the present war. In the main, 
 as I shall have occasion to point out, the atroci- 
 
114 The Prussian Hath Said in His Heart 
 
 ties committed by the German forces in Belgium 
 and France are the result of deliberate policy and 
 are ordered by the highest authorities. But there 
 have been some abominations which could have 
 no relation to any policy military or political. 
 They are due simply to the perversion of cruelty 
 which the Prussian Government has deliberately 
 engendered. And if such cruelty is often, from 
 the purely utilitarian point of view, useless and 
 mischievous when you are fighting foreigners, 
 much more is it so when you are attempting to 
 rule subjects. Yet Posen, Schleswig and Alsace- 
 Lorraine afford many examples of this insanity. 
 
 Thus were the vices of Prussia deliberately en- 
 couraged by her rulers, weakening her from year 
 to year. And that weakening arose ultimately 
 from the fact that the creed on which Prussia was 
 founded was false. Able as Frederick the Great 
 was, he had miscalculated. His system was 
 doomed to fail at last, because the world and the 
 nature of men are not what he thought them ; be- 
 cause the instinct which leads the basest to pre- 
 fer good to evil is a vital one which cannot be 
 eradicated, and the perversion of which is sui- 
 cide ; because, after all, Satan is only Prince not 
 King of this World, because there is a Judge that 
 judgeth the earth. 
 
CHAPTER VI 
 1914 
 
 Up to the dismissal of Bismarck and for many 
 years afterwards there was no sign of a quarrel 
 between Prussia and this country. Bismarck's 
 ambitions were Continental; he desired, for the 
 State which he served, first a supremacy over all 
 German States and then a predominant position 
 in Europe. He never attempted to make the Ger- 
 man Empire a naval power, and he had no desire 
 for colonies. When his power in Europe was at 
 its highest he not only refused to use it for the 
 purpose of acquiring such colonies, but deliber- 
 ately encouraged France to found a colonial em- 
 pire which he hoped might both weaken her and 
 distract her attention from the lost provinces. 
 On our side, during the last quarter of the nine- 
 teenth century the foreign policy of Great Britain 
 was mainly directed by the late Lord Salisbury, a 
 man very able and experienced, very patriotic, 
 whose chief conviction seems to have been that 
 England, situated as she was, ought to avoid war 
 
 115 
 
116 The Prussian Hath Said in His Heart 
 
 at almost any cost. To do so and yet to preserve 
 national interests intact, he conceived that the 
 wisest policy was to connect England as closely as 
 possible with an Empire which appeared to be the 
 strongest military power in Europe, and which at 
 that time was not a naval or colonial power. 
 This policy, which, among other things, was re- 
 sponsible for the ultimately disastrous cession of 
 Heligoland, might still have appeared wise and 
 prudent if that power had not shortly afterwards 
 begun to develop colonial ambitions of the most 
 arrogant type, and to entertain the definite de- 
 sign of challenging British naval supremacy. 
 
 In the main this development must be attrib- 
 uted to the megalomania which we have noted in 
 Prussia as the chief result of deliberately encour- 
 aged illusion. We in this country feel a natural 
 enthusiasm for our colonies, an enthusiasm which 
 depends less upon the idea that they increase the 
 military strength of England than on the very 
 just feeling that they increase the pride and glory 
 of England. Wanderings in wild places and the 
 establishment of settlements in uncivilised lands 
 are things for which our people have a special 
 aptitude, and we have a right to be proud of the 
 new countries which bear witness to that apti- 
 tude, as the Italians have a right to be proud of 
 
19U 117 
 
 their painting and the Germans of their music. 
 Also it fitted in well with our historic pride in 
 our naval strength, our conception of ourselves as 
 an island people sweeping the seas and finding 
 strange lands. To Prussia no such considera- 
 tions applied. Her glory, such as it was, was es- 
 sentially military and not in any way naval. She 
 was not an island; she was an inland — almost a 
 land-locked — state. Her children had no natural 
 genius for colonisation, and certainly they had no 
 natural taste for adventure. They have never 
 dreamed of going to any colony that was not al- 
 ready thoroughly established and settled by some- 
 body else. Nevertheless, a fundamentally stupid 
 desire to prove that there was nothing in which 
 any other people could be superior to Prussians, 
 induced the successors of Bismarck to abandon 
 his policy and to substitute a policy of colonial 
 expansion and naval challenge. 
 
 Bismarck was sane. If he had come to the con- 
 clusion that a war with this country was desir- 
 able, he would doubtless have engineered it with 
 his customary skill. The course was not very dif- 
 ficult. The old understanding with Russia 
 would have been strengthened in every possible 
 way. Russia would have been promised a free 
 hand in those quarters where her interests did not 
 
118 The Prussian Hath Said in His Heart 
 
 conflict with those of the German Empire. Op- 
 portunity would have been taken to increase and. 
 emphasise every possible cause of quarrel — and at 
 the time there were many — between Eussia and 
 Great Britain. When the benevolent neutrality 
 of Eussia had thus been secured, Bismarck would 
 have bent his mind to the task of making an ally 
 of France. With France also we had our dif- 
 ficulties in those days, and some of them 
 might esisily have been so manipulated as to lead 
 to an open breach. Two things only stood in the 
 way of a Franco-German Alliance, — the memory 
 of 1870 and the lost provinces which were its leg- 
 acy. But by the time that British and German 
 interests began to conflict the memory of 1870 
 was already dim ; a generation had grown up that 
 had no personal memory of the violation of the 
 national territory. As to the lost provinces, 
 which, as Bismarck had foreseen, had brought 
 no profit to Germany, they might actually have 
 been used as an asset. Bismarck had been 
 against taking Metz in the first instance ; had he 
 been in power when an attack on England began 
 to be regarded as the true end of German policy, 
 he might have given it back, perhaps in nominal 
 retura for some trifiing colonial concession. 
 That would have gone far to placate the French, 
 
19U 119 
 
 — say, at the time of the Fashoda incident. With 
 a little management the whole Continent might 
 have been ranged against Great Britain, and, 
 when the time for action came, Bismarck might 
 even have contrived so to stage-manage the busi- 
 ness that we should appear to be the aggressors. 
 He had done the thing before. 
 
 Fortunately for this country those who in- 
 herited Bismarck's power and his lack of con- 
 science inherited none of his other qualities. He 
 might ignore morals, but he did not ignore facts. 
 But they were bitten with the new Superman 
 idea, and were conscious of no facts save their 
 own evident superiority to the rest of mankind. 
 They had no idea of a policy save to "hack their 
 way through," to destroy nation after nation un- 
 til Prussia alone was left erect. 
 
 It should be observed that about ten years be- 
 fore the present war broke out two events oc- 
 curred which rather tended to confirm the Prus- 
 sians in their delusion. First, in 1904 Bussia, a 
 power which Bismarck had always sought to 
 conciliate and of which even his successors had 
 always stood in some awe, was decisively de- 
 feated by Japan. This disaster, which among 
 other things brought into prominence the defects 
 of the Eussian military system, was followed by 
 
120 The Prussian Hath Said in His Heart 
 
 an insurrectionary movement in Eussia itself. 
 The Hohenzollems, in accordance with their tra- 
 ditional policy, lent their support to the Tsar's 
 Government in resisting that movement which, 
 after a fierce struggle, collapsed, mainly, per- 
 haps, owing to its gradual divorce from the na- 
 tional and especially from the religious instincts 
 of the populace. But the Japanese war and the 
 abortive Eevolution tended to make the Prussian 
 rulers believe that the effective power of Eussia 
 had been overrated ; that she need not be feared. 
 
 The next year, 1905, a deliberate and provoca- 
 tive challenge offered by Germany to France 
 found the latter unprepared; the resignation of 
 M. Delcass6 followed, and Prussian diplomacy 
 scored a decided success, small, perhaps, in its 
 practical value, but calculated to impress the 
 public mind of Europe and especially the public 
 mind of Prussia itself. 
 
 This diplomatic check to France was followed 
 by an even more decided check to Eussia. This 
 arose out of the affair of the "Young Turk" Eevo- 
 lution, when a small group of intriguers organ- 
 ised in Masonic Lodges and financed by the 
 wealthy Jews of Salonika, suborned the Turkish 
 Army and pulled down the Sultan, Abdul Hamid 
 II, an able sovereign, who had ruled, indeed, as 
 
19U 121 
 
 a Turk always rules, but who had preserved the 
 independence and prestige of the Ottoman Em- 
 pire through a very difficult time with great skill 
 and foresight. His successors showed no such 
 competence and their triumph dealt a death-blow 
 to the Ottoman power; for that power rested 
 on a great religion, and of all religions the 
 "Young Turks" were utterly contemptuous. Aus- 
 tria seized the opportunity to annex formally 
 two provinces of the Turkish Empire, Bosnia and 
 Herzegovina, which they had been occupying un- 
 der a nominal Turkish suzerainty since 1878. 
 Serbia, whose people had a racial, and to a great 
 extent, religious affinity to the population of 
 these provinces, vehemently protested: and her 
 protest was backed by Russia. But the rulers of 
 Germany not only let it be known that they 
 would support Austria to the point of war, but 
 rapidly massed troops on the Russian frontier. 
 Russia had not yet recovered from the effects of 
 the Japanese war and the convulsions which fol- 
 lowed it. Her mobilisation was, in any case, 
 slow. France showed a marked indisposition to 
 be drawn into the quarrel, and without France 
 England was not likely to move. Russia gave 
 way, and compelled Serbia to do the same. 
 
 Meanwhile the naval strength of Germany was 
 
122 The Prussian Hath Said in His Heart 
 
 being continually augmented, not, as Bismarck 
 would have augmented it, steadily and quietly, 
 but to the accompaniment of a continual flourish 
 of trumpets and of loud (if unofficial) threats 
 against this country. Thus was Great Britain 
 forced to change her traditional policy and throw 
 in her lot with France and Eussia. No one who 
 has comprehended the real character and aims of 
 Prussia, and who values either the national self- 
 respfect of England or the rights and liberties of 
 Europe, will be anything but thankful for the 
 change, but it is doubtful if anything but the 
 insolence of Prussia's threats and the menace of 
 her provocatively paraded preparations would 
 have induced our rulers to make it. 
 
 Two other events must be mentioned if we are 
 to understand rightly the motives which induced 
 the rulers of Germany to provoke the present 
 war. 
 
 One was the episode of Agadir. At a time 
 when France was successfully pushing forward 
 an expedition against Fez, the capital of Mo- 
 rocco, the German Government sent a war-ship 
 to the harbour of Agadir on the Atlantic coast. 
 The whole character of this move has been much 
 misunderstood. Without putting too blind a re- 
 liance on the confessions of the ex-spy "Arm- 
 
19U 123 
 
 gaard Karl Graves," one may find this part of 
 his narrative fairly' credible, the more so as it 
 confirms what those best informed realised at the 
 time. The sending of the Panther to Agadir 
 was not a challenge to France. The spot chosen 
 was far away from the part of North Africa 
 which the French desired to penetrate. It was 
 much more of a challenge to England, for, as a 
 glance at the map will show, the new harbour 
 which it was proposed to create there was ideally 
 suited for striking at all our principal trade 
 routes. We have had a good reason during the 
 present war to be thankful that it was not avail- 
 able as a naval base. The main object, however, 
 was undoubtedly to see how fast the Franco- 
 British alliance held. Its effect was to show 
 that such an attempt would be resisted by the 
 combined forces of both countries. Then the 
 Panther left Agadir, the German Government 
 not being prepared for immediate war. To the 
 Prussian people, deliberately kept in the dark in 
 regard to all such matters, the evacuation 
 seemed a mere surrender, and it became the more 
 important to wipe it out as soon as circum- 
 stances more favourable to Germany arose. 
 
 The second event was the outbreak and suc- 
 cessful prosecution of the Balkan Wars. Here a 
 
124 The Prussian Hath Said in His Heart 
 
 policy hostile to that pursued by Prussia, a policy 
 which had for its aim the destruction of Turk- 
 ish rule in the European provinces of the Otto- 
 man Empire, appealed to arms and won. The 
 Germanic Powers could not prevent it winning, 
 though Austria precipitated the second Balkan 
 War by stopping Serbia's outlet to the sea and 
 insisting (with Italy) on the creation of the 
 neutral State of Albania, whose territory was 
 artificially extended so as to include the all-im- 
 portant strategic position of Valona. Never- 
 theless, — and it is very important to remember 
 this — ^the Balkan Wars represented in the eyes 
 of the world, as a whole, a defeat for the Ger- 
 manic Powers, whose ally and dependant Turkey 
 had been. It was also a special blow to Prussian 
 military prestige: for the training of the Turk- 
 ish army was Prussian. 
 
 I mention these four incidents in order because 
 they help us to understand the state of mind of 
 the Prussian rulers, and the understanding of 
 that state of mind is the key to the whole mys- 
 tery of the present war and its origin. 
 
 Let us suppose a man whose main ambition is 
 to establish his superiority in wealth over an- 
 other man. Let us imagine him caught by acci- 
 dent without his cheque-book and compelled to 
 
19U 125 
 
 borrow a sovereign in the presence of Ms rival. 
 What will he do? If he is a man with anything 
 of the Prussian in him he will seize the first op- 
 portunity of displaying his wealth in the most 
 ostentatious fashion, or he will make on the other 
 man some sudden claim which will demonstrate 
 his comparative poverty. 
 
 Such was the situation of the Imperial Gov- 
 ernment, and just so did it act. 
 
 It was the whole aim of Prussian policy to 
 make the world believe that the German Empire 
 was stronger than its rivals. Probably the Prus- 
 sian rulers, certainly the Prussian people, be- 
 lieved it themselves. Moreover two of the inci- 
 dents referred to, the dismissal of M. Delcass§ 
 and the abandonment of Bosnia, had seemed to 
 justify the belief. But then it was overclouded. 
 Germany had the appearance of having retreated 
 from Agadir under Franco-British pressure, and 
 of having been compelled to permit a rearrange- 
 ment of the Balkan States unfavourable both to 
 her interests and her prestige. 
 
 There was only two courses that could restore 
 what had been lost. The Triple Entente must 
 either be crushed by arms or it must be dissolved, 
 and each of its separate members forced to 
 choose between a public humiliation and a war 
 
126 The Prussian Hath Said in His Heart 
 
 without allies. The second alternative was de- 
 sired by Prussia : for the first, she was, if neces- 
 sary, prepared. 
 
 I emphasise this point, because those who are 
 disposed to disbelieve, in spite of the unanswer- 
 able evidence of public documents, in the full re- 
 sponsibility of Prussia for this war, have just 
 one argument which may seem plausible. How, 
 they ask, is it possible to believe that Germany 
 deliberately provoked a war in which she had so 
 little chance of ultimate success? The answer is 
 that she did not, in the first instance, intend 
 war; she hoped for a surrender, which would 
 shatter the Triple Entente and leave her hands 
 free for the crushing or humiliation of France, 
 and finally for a successful attack on this coun- 
 try. 
 
 The incident which gave her, as she thought, 
 the desired opening was the assassination of the 
 Archduke Francis Ferdinand of Austria. 
 
 This remarkable man was the last of that 
 breed of skilful and original statesmen who have 
 held together the curious composite Empire of 
 the Hapsburgs. It is a mistake to speak of Aus- 
 tria as if she were a nation. Austria is simply 
 the Hapsburgs and the Hapsburgs are simply a 
 dynasty. The various dominions which acknowl- 
 
19U 127 
 
 edge the sovereignty of that dynasty are united 
 by no common tie of national sentiment. They 
 do not think of themselves as "Austrians," but as 
 Germans, Czechs, Poles, Magyars, Slovaks or 
 what not. On the other hand the Austrian Em- 
 pire does not, like the Prussian, rest on mere 
 military domination. No European power has 
 been more constantly beaten in war with less 
 visible result. The Hapsburgs have ruled by 
 diplomacy and statecraft, on the playing oflE of 
 one people against another, and on the mainte- 
 nance of a careful balance among rival powers. 
 From the time of Kaunitz onwards they never 
 lacked men capable of such management. 
 
 The policy of the Archduke Ferdinand was as 
 far-sighted as it was daring. He aimed at a real 
 union of all the races which made up the Aus- 
 trian Empire on the basis of the one thing com- 
 mon to almost all of them, — ^the Catholic religion. 
 On this ground northern and southern Slavs (his 
 wife, who was murdered with him, was a Pole) 
 could rally to the House of Hapsburg. Austria- 
 Hungary could assume that valuable office which 
 Masonic sectarianism had lost to France, that 
 of protector of Catholic interests in the Near 
 East, and would thus become a formidable 
 counterpoise to Russia, the traditional protector 
 
128 The Prussian Hath Said in His Heart 
 
 of the Orthodox Church. But in order that this 
 policy might succeed the Catholic Slavs must be 
 made to feel that they enjoyed full freedom and 
 equality under the Hapsburg crown. The chief 
 obstacle to this lay in the irritating privileges 
 and exclusive spirit of the two oligarchies — Ger- 
 man and Magyar — which practically ruled the 
 Dual Empire. These privileges Francis Ferdi- 
 nand set himself to curtail, and of that spirit he 
 was the known and avowed enemy. 
 
 On June 28th, 1914, he was assassinated in the 
 streets of Sarajevo, the capital of Bosnia. The 
 murderers were apparently Bosnians of Slavonic 
 race. What ramifications there may have been 
 in connection with the conspiracy we do not yet 
 know, and, perhaps, shall never know. The Aus- 
 trian Government professes to have proofs that 
 it was hatched in Belgrade, and that Serbian of- 
 ficers were accessories to it ; but these proofs have 
 not yet been produced. It is clear that the aims 
 of the Archduke were likely to be very distaste- 
 ful to the Orthodox Slavs of Serbia and to their 
 brothers within the Austrian Empire as well as 
 to the Orthodox Government of Eussia. On the 
 other hand it is certain that they were at least 
 equally offensive to German and Magyar official- 
 dom at Vienna and Buda-Pesth, — ^nay, to the old 
 
19U 129 
 
 Emperor himself, and still more to his ally at 
 Berlin. There are some queer features about 
 the story that suggest some sort of double 
 treason : for instance the extraordinary failure of 
 the authorities to protect this Archduke's life 
 even after one attempt on it had been made. 
 Finally, there is the startling declaration of the 
 Serbian Government, that that Government had 
 had suspicions of one of the assassins (an Aus- 
 trian subject), but on making enquiries of the 
 Austrian Government had been assured that the 
 man was "harmless and under its protection." 
 All this looks rather as if, though the actual 
 criminals may have been Pan-Serbian fanatics, 
 the agent provocateur was not absent from their 
 deliberations. But I need not go into these dark 
 matters further. In order to be as fair as pos- 
 sible to the enemy, let us assume that the Aus- 
 trian Government did hold in its hand proof of 
 Serbian complicity in the plot. 
 
 If it were possible to conceive the paradox of 
 the Archduke Francis Ferdinand having to deal 
 with the situation created by his own murder, 
 or, if he had been able to bequeath to a successor 
 his abilities and his policy, it is not difficult to 
 guess how the problem would have been handled. 
 He would certainly have used the opportunity 
 
130 The Prussian Hath Said in His Heart 
 
 to reassert the Hapsburg power in the Balkans 
 and to humble and discredit Serbia. If he had 
 proof of Serbian guilt he would either have pub- 
 lished it, or, perhaps more probably, he would 
 have communicated it privately to the Serbian 
 Government with a threat that it would be pub- 
 lished if certain concessions were not made. 
 How hard and humiliating and even unjust he 
 might have made the terms of Serbia's submis- 
 sion without provoking war may be seen by the 
 extent to which Serbia was forced by Kussia to 
 accept the Austrian demands, monstrous as they 
 were. Francis Ferdinand would have counted 
 on this, and probably scored a great increase of 
 prestige for Austria at the expense of both Ser- 
 bia and Eussia. But war he would at all costs 
 have avoided, for from that the Hapsburgs had 
 nothing to gain and everything to lose. The 
 Austrian Empire does not show at its best in war. 
 Even a war with Serbia single-handed would cost 
 a great effort, for Serbia had already displayed 
 in two brilliant campaigns the splendid mili- 
 tary prowess of her arms. Moreover a war with 
 Serbia was almost bound to mean a war with 
 Eussia, and Eussia could indubitably crush Aus- 
 tria with one hand. If Austria were saved from 
 such a fate, it could only be by the intervention 
 
19U 181 
 
 of Prussia, and if such interval were successful, 
 Berlin and not Vienna must be the gainer. Nay, 
 Berlin would inevitably gain at the expense of 
 Vienna : the Hapsburgs would be more than ever 
 mere dependants of the Hohenzollems, who 
 would become the real masters of the Empire as 
 well as the reversionaries of its German prov- 
 inces. 
 
 When all this is kept in view, it is impossible 
 to imagine that any one who had the interests of 
 the Hapsburg dynasty at heart could have ad- 
 vised Francis Joseph to throw away every diplo- 
 matic advantage in order to make peace impos- 
 sible and war an immediate certainty. Yet that 
 is what he unquestionably did. The whole in- 
 terest of the negotiations in their first phase 
 centres round the question of why he did it. 
 
 But first let us follow the course of events. 
 The Archduke was, as I say, murdered on June 
 28th. For nearly a month Austria did nothing. 
 She said nothing to her antagonist Serbia, noth- 
 ing to her own ally Italy. Neither the Russian 
 nor the British Government could obtain any in- 
 formation as to her intentions. All that was 
 known during that month of sOence was that 
 Austria was replenishing her stocks of ammuni- 
 tion. Wie shall see, however, that the German 
 
132 The Prussian Hath Said in His Heart 
 
 Government was throughout this time in close 
 and confidential communication with its ally. 
 
 On July 22nd the Serbian Government received 
 its first communication from Vienna. It took 
 the form of an ultimatum. A categorically sat- 
 isfactory answer was to reach the Austrian Gov- 
 ernment within forty-eight hours. A refusal or 
 evasion, or even a remonstrance on any single 
 point, would mean instant war. 
 
 Now any one who fairly examines this amaz- 
 ing document will at once perceive that, with 
 whatever intention it was sent, it was certainly 
 not intended to be accepted. Nay, those who 
 framed it were clearly afraid above all things of 
 its acceptance, and were always on the guard 
 against this dangerous possibility. Whatever a 
 demand might conceivably, though not without 
 cruel mortification, be complied with, something 
 is added calculated to make compliance out of the 
 question. Thus the Serbian Government is not 
 only asked to publish an official condemnation of 
 all anti-Austrian propaganda, but virtually to 
 plead guilty (not a tittle of evidence of its gTiilt 
 being produced) to having in Adolation of solemn 
 pledges encouraged such propaganda in the past. 
 The Serbian Government is further asked to do 
 things which (as must have been perfectly well- 
 
1914 133 
 
 known both in Vienna and in Berlin) it was not 
 constitutionally competent to do, — as, for in- 
 stance, to suppress and confiscate newspapers. 
 It was asked to do things which no Government 
 is physically capable of doing, — to control the 
 secret proceedings of unnamed persons. Finally, 
 three demands were made which I set out ver- 
 batim. They are plainly inconsistent with any 
 sort of national independence; indeed I cannot 
 see how the most triumphant military conquest 
 could have annexed Serbia more completely to 
 the Hapsburg Empire than would their accept- 
 ance : — 
 
 To remove from the military service, and from the 
 administration in general, all officers and function- 
 aries guilty of propaganda against the Austro-Hun- 
 garian Monarchy whose names and deeds the Austro- 
 Hungarian Government reserve to themselves the right 
 of commumicatinff to the Boyal Government. ' 
 
 To accept the collaboration in Serbia of representa- 
 tives of the Austro-Hungarian Government for the 
 suppression of the subversive movement directed 
 against the territorial integrity of the Monarchy. 
 
 To take judicial proceedings against accessories to 
 the plot of June 28th who are on Serbian territory. 
 Delegates of the Austro-Hungarian Government will 
 take part in the investigation thereto. 
 
 It is clear that the Emperor of Austria was 
 playing not for a diplomatic victory but for a 
 
134 The Prussian Hath Said in His Heart 
 
 rupture. I think I have made it equally clear 
 that the Hapsburg dynasty had everything to 
 hope from such a diplomatic victory and every- 
 thing to fear from such a rupture. It may be 
 suggested that the Emperor Francis Joseph was 
 an old man, already cruelly wounded more than 
 once in his family life, and that the tragic death 
 of his heir drove him beyond the limits of reason ; 
 but, laying aside the notorious fact that he hated 
 that heir, the month's delay precludes the idea of 
 a mere outburst of passion. 
 
 No, the plain conclusion — and, as we shall 
 see, it is borne out by the whole course of subse- 
 quent negotiations — ^is that some other person or 
 Power, whose interests might be promoted by a 
 rupture was using Francis Joseph as a cat's paw. 
 
 That Power, of course, could only be Prussia. 
 Let us see how the situation affected the aims of 
 Prussia, and how the Kaiser and his Ministers 
 might conceive it to be to their interest to act. 
 
 Prussia had little interest in the Balkan 
 troubles, except in so far as she had appeared as 
 the unsuccessful protector of the Turk. Her 
 Government, theoretically Protestant, practically 
 Atheist, had no possible concern with the re- 
 ligious quarrels of Greek and Latin. She had 
 only a secondary interest in the maintenance of 
 
19U 135 
 
 the Austrian Empire; indeed she probably hoped 
 ultimately to acquire a large accession of terri- 
 tory on the dissolution of that Empire. But she 
 had a very direct interest in re-establishing that 
 prestige which the retreat from Agadir and the 
 overthrow of Turkey had somewhat damaged. 
 She had, above all, a very pressing interest in the 
 break-up of the Triple Entente and the isolation 
 of her three potential enemies. Let us see why 
 she may have thought the occasion promising for 
 such a project. 
 
 Russia was exceedingly anxious to avoid war. 
 She had good reason to be so, for her internal 
 situation seemed not a little dangerous. There 
 were symptoms of a revival of the revolutionary 
 activities of 1905 : a great strike had been de- 
 clared among the artizans of her principal towns, 
 and a friend of mine saw the barricades being 
 thrown up in what was then still St. Petersburg 
 a week before war broke out. How strongly the 
 Tsar's Government felt the dangers of an inter- 
 national crisis is shown by the pressure it put on 
 Serbia to meet every demand of Austria's that 
 could thinkably be met. Still, if Serbia were at- 
 tacked, Eussia would have to fight or lose her 
 whole influence in the Balkans and confess her- 
 self a defeated and humbled power. 
 
136 The Prussian Hath Said in His Heart 
 
 I have said that the Prussians, with the Eusso- 
 Japanese W^ar in their minds, almost certainly 
 underrated the military efiEectiveness of Eussia. 
 At any rate, they felt confident that they and 
 their Austrian allies could easUy beat Eussia if 
 Eussia was fighting single-handed. But would 
 Eussia be single-handed? It is at this point that 
 I fancy the principal Prussian miscalculations 
 began. 
 
 That Parliamentary system, which so con- 
 stantly misrepresents the French nation, had in 
 the earlier months of 1914 evolved a Chamber of 
 which, though the capital, which always leads 
 France, had shown a vigorous national spirit, 
 the general complexion was what is called in 
 France Blocard, — that is to say Masonic and 
 more or less Pacifist. The Socialists, opposed by 
 tradition both to war and to the Eussian alli- 
 ance, had received a great accession of strength. 
 An attempt to form a Coalition Government 
 leaning partly on the Eight had failed, and the 
 Premiership had been entrusted to M. Viviani, an 
 ex-Socialist and a sometime opponent of these 
 military measures, notably the Three Years' Serv- 
 ice Law by which France sought to secure her- 
 self from Prussian aggression. From the new 
 Government not only the Conservatives but those 
 
19U 137 
 
 Eadicals who, like M. Briand and M. Milleraiid, 
 had taken up a strong national attitude, were ex- 
 cluded. M. Jaur6s, the Socialist leader, though 
 not a member of it, was believed to be its master. 
 
 These things, we know, were carefully noted in 
 Berlin. The Prussians had always reckoned on 
 the Anti-Militarist agitation conducted by M. 
 Gustav Herv6 as an ally: it is said that they 
 counted on a rising in half a dozen French in- 
 dustrial towns at the instant of mobilisation. 
 They probably now felt that they could reckon 
 also on a Pacifist element in the Ministry and in 
 the Chambers. 
 
 It is probable that in the earlier stages, at 
 least, of the negotiations^ Prussia hoped for the 
 neutrality of France. She certainly expected the 
 neutrality of England, and that up to the last 
 moment. England had been involved by the pro- 
 fessional sham fighting of her politicians in a 
 trouble which at the moment looked serious. 
 The agreement between the Front Benches that 
 Home Eule must be granted to Ireland had not 
 been accompanied by any satisfactory settlement 
 of the small but very real problem of the popula- 
 tion of the northeast comer of that island whose 
 national and still more whose religious sentiments 
 were hostile to government from Dublin. Eound 
 
138 The Prussian Hath Said in His Heart 
 
 this detail, which ought to have been arranged 
 at once by the simple device of the local plebiscite, 
 the play-acting began once more, and it did not 
 end until a theatrical pretence of coercion had 
 stimulated both Nationalists and Orangemen to 
 arms, and dragged the armed forces of the Crown 
 into a mischievous association with political 
 parties. The Prussians, served all too well by 
 their spies, whom by their traditional system of 
 promiscuous payment for any information re- 
 ceived, they had stimulated to send in any reports 
 that might be floating about, seem to have believed 
 sincerely that we were on the verge of civil war, 
 and that our army had failed us. It is also more 
 than probable that some of the many wealthy 
 men (such as in peaceful times mainly control 
 English politics) who were of German birth or 
 connections, felt able to assure their compatriots 
 that it was in their power to prevent this country 
 engaging in a war. Anyhow, the Prussian au- 
 thorities clearly believed that we were certain to 
 remain neutral, and one may surmise that they 
 hoped that our refusal might influence the con- 
 duct of France. 
 
 To return to the Prussian plan. Kussia, if de- 
 serted by her allies, must either fight single- 
 handed or surrender. Whichever she did, the 
 
19U 139 
 
 Triple Entente would be destroyed. Russia 
 could not be expected to come to the assistance of 
 those who in her hour of need had failed her. 
 It would then be possible to play the same game 
 with France without danger of Russian interven- 
 tion. The Franco-British combination would 
 again be "tested," — it was hoped with more satis- 
 factory results. France in her turn would be 
 either beaten or humiliated, Belgium and perhaps 
 Holland annexed, and then the way would be 
 clear for the last war which would secure Prussia 
 on the seas and over the seas the supremacy which 
 she had already achieved on the Continent. 
 
 I do not say that this was a wise plan. It was 
 not such a plan as Bismarck would have devised ; 
 and the event has proved that it was based on a 
 whole series of miscalculations. But I do say 
 that it is an intelligible plan, and that it is 
 consonant with the psychology of Prussia, of 
 post-Bismarckian Prussia, the Prussia of bom- 
 bast and self-delusion, the Prussia of the de- 
 cadence. And I say that its adoption by the 
 rulers of the German Empire is the one hypothe- 
 sis which fully explains the whole story of the 
 negotiations. 
 
 That story being armed with its key, we may 
 now resume. And it will be well to follow it 
 
140 The Prussian Hath Said in His Heart 
 
 not only in the British official account, but in the 
 German Government's own white paper which, 
 along with much special pleading, contains some 
 very interesting information which was neces- 
 sarily unknown to our Foreign Office. I take 
 my quotations from the translation given in a 
 supplement of the New York Times dated August 
 24th. The paper itself bears the date of Au- 
 gust 3rd. 
 
 First of all we have the full admission that 
 the German Government was privy to the attack 
 on Serbia during the whole month of its secret 
 preparation. Here is the quotation: — 
 
 In view of these circumstances Austria had to admit 
 that it would not be consistent either with the dignity 
 or self-preservation of the monarchy to look on any 
 longer at the operations on the other side of the border 
 without taking action. The Austro-Hungarian Gov- 
 ernment advised us of this view of the situation and 
 asked our opinion on the matter. We were able to 
 assure our ally most heartily of our agreement with 
 her view of the situation, and to assure her that any 
 action that she might consider it necessary to take in 
 order to put an end to the movement in Serbia directed 
 against the existence of the Austro-Hungarian mon- 
 archy would receive our approval. We were fully 
 aware in this connection that warlike moves on the 
 part of Austria-Hungary against Serbia would bring 
 Russia into the question and might draw us into a war 
 in accordance with our duties of an ally. However, 
 
19U 141 
 
 recognising the vital interest of Austria-Hungary 
 which were at stake, we could neither advise our ally 
 to a compliance that would have heen consistent with 
 her dignity, nor could we deny her our support in 
 this great hour of need. 
 
 We have it then acknowledged that Berlin was 
 a party to the original outrage. That she cer- 
 tainly inspired that outrage I shall endeav6nr 
 to show presently. 
 
 But at least the pretence that Berlin en- 
 deavoured to influence Vienna in a pacific direc- 
 tion which did much duty in the days immedi- 
 ately preceding the war, especially while the 
 neutrality of England was still hoped for, is 
 thrown overboard. The German Government 
 consented to "transmit suggestions of various 
 kinds for the maintenance of peace" from Sir Ed- 
 ward Grey to Vienna, but she does not now pre- 
 tend that she advised the acceptance of any of 
 them ; and in view of what happened later it is 
 pretty safe to assume that they were transmitted 
 with a broad hint that they should be refused. 
 The language of the German White Paper on this 
 subject is so exquisitely Prussian that I must 
 really transcribe it: — 
 
 From the very beginning of the conflict we took the 
 stand that this was an affair of Austria which ^e 
 alone would have to bring to a decision with Serbia. 
 
142 The Prussian Hath Said in His Heart 
 
 We have therefore devoted our entire efforts to local- 
 ising the war and to convincing the other powers that 
 Austria-Hungary was compelled to take justified de- 
 fensive methods and appeal to arms. We took the 
 stand emphatically that no civilised nation had the 
 right in this struggle against lack of culture (Un- 
 kultur) and criminal political morality to prevent 
 Austria from acting and to take away the just punish- 
 ment from Serbia. We instructed our representatives 
 abroad in that sense. 
 
 So far so good. We knew all about Prussian 
 "culture" — and Prussian "political morality" al- 
 ready. But now we come to a new development 
 which throws a flood of light upon all that had 
 happened before. 
 
 Austria had declared war on Serbia on July 
 28th. But in the last three days of the month 
 she suddenly began to show herself much more 
 reasonable. She consented to a proposal for di- 
 rect negotiations with Russia, and these negotia- 
 tions were proceeding so satisfactorily that peace 
 seemed almost assured. Says Sir Maurice de 
 Bunsen in his last despatch from Vienna : "M, 
 Schebeko (the Russian Ambassador) to the end 
 was working hard for peace. He was holding the 
 most conciliatory language to Count Berchtold 
 (the Austrian Foreign Minister) and he informed 
 me that the latter, as well, as Count Forgach (his 
 Under-Secretary) had responded in the same 
 
19U 143 
 
 spirit." Then suddenly when peace was already 
 in full sight, came war. I again quote Sir Mau- 
 rice de Bunsen: — 
 
 Unfortunately these conversations at St. Peters- 
 burg and Vienna were cut short by the transfer of 
 the dispute to the more dangerous ground of a direct 
 conflict between Germany and Eussia. Germany in- 
 tervened on the 31st of July by means of her double 
 ultimatums to St. Petersburg and Paris. The ulti- 
 matums were of a kind to which only one answer is 
 possible, and Germany declared war on Russia on the 
 1st of August, and on France on the 3rd of August. 
 A few days' delay might in all probability have saved 
 Europe from one of the greatest calamities in history. 
 
 It is clear that in the end the Prussian Govern- 
 ment forced war not only on her enemies but on 
 her unfortunate ally. The pretence that the al- 
 leged Russian and French mobilisation forced 
 her hand is nonsense. The anxiety of France to 
 avoid anything that could ever be construed into 
 hostile action placed her at a grave disadvantage 
 when war came, and, if Russia partially mobil- 
 ised she only acted with common prudence. Her 
 mobilisation was notoriously a slower business 
 than that of her enemies, one of whom was al- 
 ready fully mobilised. She could hardly be ex- 
 pected to forget how Prussia, by massing troops 
 on her undefended frontiers, had compelled her to 
 
144 The Prussian Hath Said in His Heart 
 
 a humiliating surrender over Bosnia : she was not 
 likely to be caught napping a second time. 
 
 The real meaning of the whole story is made 
 clear by the sudden hesitation of Vienna to pro- 
 ceed to extremities (Austria did not, in fact, de- 
 clare war against Russia till a week later than 
 Germany) and the equally sudden decision of 
 Berlin for instant war. 
 
 I take the explanation to be this : Austria had 
 adopted her outrageous provocation policy in the 
 matter of Serbia at the direct instigation of Ber- 
 lin, and that she had done so on definite assurance 
 that she would have no one but Serbia to fight, 
 and that her ally would see that Russia did not 
 move. When it became obirious that the Prussian 
 assurances were unfounded, that Russia meant to 
 fight, and that all Europe would be involved in 
 the war, Austria, whose rulers would be risking 
 everything in such a war and could get nothing 
 out of it, wished to withdraw and insisted on 
 opening communications with Russia. What ex- 
 actly passed between the allies we cannot tell ; it 
 is significant that none of their communications 
 appear in the German White Paper. But it is 
 evident that the Prussian Government feared a 
 peaceful solution which would look like another 
 diplomatic success for the Triple Entente. 
 
19U 145 
 
 Rather than face such a possibility she would her- 
 self precipitate war and drag her helpless ally 
 along with her. If the reader will turn back 
 to the account I have given of the Ems affairs and 
 of how Bismarck made war inevitable in 1870 
 (or, better still, read Bismarck's own account of 
 these transactions ) he will see how little the po- 
 litical morality of Prussian statesmen has 
 changed in the interval, however much their in- 
 telligence may have deteriorated. 
 
 By the time the Prussians determined on war 
 with Russia they knew, whatever may have been 
 their previous illusions, that they would have to 
 fight France as well. What they were perhaps 
 less prepared for was the absolute unanimity of 
 France in the face of their aggression. Before 
 war was declared, Jean Jaur6s, on whom they 
 had counted to oppose French intervention, made 
 a speech to an international gathering of Social- 
 ists at Brussels in which he denounced in unmeas- 
 ured terms the manner in which Serbia had been 
 treated. "We are for the weak against the 
 strong," he said. A few days afterwards he was 
 assassinated, whether by a fanatical madman or 
 by a secret emissary of Germany cannot yet be 
 said with any confidence. But more startling 
 phenomena were to follow the actual outbreak 
 
146 The Prussian Hath Said in His Heart 
 
 of war. The Confederation Generate de Travail, 
 which had been expected to oblige Berlin by start- 
 ing a revolution in the Kaiser's interest, issued 
 instead a manifesto appealing to all its members 
 to rally to the national defence; and Gustav 
 Herv6, the apostle of Anti-Militarism, went 
 straight to the War Office and begged to be sent 
 into the firing line. 
 
 There was still one unknown quantity in the 
 European situation — the attitude of England. 
 It is evident from the dramatic account we have 
 of our ambassador's last interview with the Ger- 
 man Chancellor, that Prussia counted absolutely 
 on the neutrality of this country. That she 
 should have so counted, seeing that the reduction 
 of this country to vassalage was the real ob- 
 jective of her complex policy, seems extraordi- 
 nary. But, apart from the exaggerated im- 
 portance which their spies had led them to 
 attach to the Irish trouble there was much to 
 encourage their delusion. 
 
 It may be well to say quite frankly that in 
 my judgment there was a course which Sir Ed- 
 ward Grey could have taken which might possibly 
 — though not certainly--have averted this war. 
 That course was the one persistently pressed on 
 us by M. Sazonof, the Russian Minister for For- 
 
I9U 147 
 
 eign Affairs. If at the very beginning of the 
 trouble, we had declared that, in the event of war 
 breaking out, we should join France and Eussia, 
 it is not altogether unlikely that Berlin might 
 have paused and allowed Austria to extricate her- 
 self, as she was anxious to do, from an untenable 
 position. But Sir Edward Grey persistently re- 
 fused to make such a declaration, and Berlin 
 drew the natural inference. 
 
 Nor was it in Berlin only that that inferencfe 
 was drawn. Many Englishmen shared the im- 
 pression. Many of us will not easily forget the 
 black week which preceded the actual declara- 
 tion of war, when we half feared that we were 
 going to see England lose her honour and won- 
 dered vaguely whether the Englishman could ever 
 go abroad again without feeling the contempt of 
 mankind striking him in the face like a blow. 
 
 Fear was the heavier upon those who knew 
 best how powerful were the forces arranged on 
 the side of a shameful inaction. There were 
 among the wealthy men who finance our politi- 
 cians some who had fancy religions, hostile to 
 arms, while others had a more human and intelli- 
 gible objection to paying taxes. Worse, there 
 were Germans and German Jews among them, 
 men powerful in the City and all-powerful at 
 
148 The Prussian Hath Said in His Heart 
 
 Westminster. Their influence was soon felt. 
 Everywhere one could almost physically feel the 
 pressure of cosmopolitan finance seeking to swing 
 English policy clear of intervention. 
 
 Fortunately the Prussians saved us from the 
 intrigues of their allies by a last brutal and 
 cynical violation of international honour, which 
 was also a direct challenge to our own. It has 
 been said by some that the defence of Belgian 
 neutrality was only a pretext. I should be the 
 last to deny that if Belgium had never existed it 
 would have been none the less necessary, both to 
 our honour and to our safety, to come to the aid 
 of France in her fight against Prussian aggres- 
 sion. All the same, I doubt, and I think from a 
 remark he made to the German Ambassador that 
 Sir Edward Grey himself doubted, whether any- 
 thing less flagrant than the Belgian crime would 
 have nerved our Government to defy the wealth 
 and power of the Pacifists and the international 
 money dealers. 
 
 As to the rights and wrongs of the Belgian 
 question there is really no argument. Belgium 
 was a small and pacific nation, whose attitude to- 
 wards its neighbours had always been scrupu- 
 lously correct, and whose neutrality had more 
 than once been solemnly guaranteed by all the 
 
19U 149 
 
 powers, including Prussia and England. Prus- 
 sia, alleging no wrong, proposed to violate that 
 neutrality because it would be convenient to at- 
 tack France by a road which France, relying on 
 the pledges of Belgium and the guarantee of the 
 powers, had left unbarred. She proposed in the 
 first instance to ask Belgium to break her prom- 
 ise to France. Failing that, Prussia would break 
 her promise to Belgium and invite England to 
 facilitate the breach by breaking hers. In ex- 
 change for all this wreck of promises, Belgium 
 and England were to receive a new assortment 
 of the never-to-be-broken promises of Prussia's 
 King ! There is a curious simplicity as well as 
 an insolent wickedness in this proposal that 
 fairly takes one's breath away. 
 
 It has been well said that we can never know 
 all the good in men until we know all the evil. 
 Our habit of plastering over the sins of the great 
 with vague words of confidence and eulogy, some- 
 times does them a real injustice. Only those 
 who know how deeply corruption had bitten into 
 the public life of England will be able to under- 
 stand how much real heroism there was in the 
 refusal of our rulers to obey the money bags in 
 the matter of this war. To many of us it seemed 
 that among the governing class of England hon- 
 
150 The Prussian Hath Said in His Heart 
 
 our was utterly dead. They had taken the money 
 of usurers, many of whom were not even English- 
 men. They had received these men in their 
 houses. They had sold them titles for themselves 
 and places on the Front Benches for their rela- 
 tions and dependants. They had connived at 
 every profitable ramp, and hushed up every un- 
 speakable scandal. There seemed nothing to 
 which they would not stoop. And yet there was 
 something. The most dramatic, perhaps, in a 
 sense, the noblest incident of the dark drama is 
 one of which we shall never hear, for those who 
 behaved well will conceal it as carefully as those 
 who behaved basely. It came when the pluto- 
 crats, at the conclusion of their long tale of dis- 
 honouring bargains, asked for the honour of 
 England to be thrown in as a make weight 
 against their money: and their demand was re- 
 fused. 
 
CHAPTER VII 
 
 THE BAEBAEIANS 
 
 On August Srd this year bodies of soldiers in 
 blue-grey uniforms began to cross the narrow 
 river which marks the frontier between the Ger- 
 man Empire and the little independent state of 
 Belgium. For days they continued to pour 
 across that line, mounted Uhlans with their 
 lances, great masses of infantry closely packed, 
 the tall men of the Prussian Guard, carrying 
 with them a lingering memory of the madness of 
 old Frederick William. Guns also came with 
 them, maxims, field artillery, and a little later 
 the huge howitzer siege guns, the latest master- 
 pieces of Krupp, able to throw shells of a ton 
 weight over miles of country, built to make an 
 end of the forts of Paris. 
 
 All these things were new, and yet there was 
 that about those great masses of moving men that 
 recalled a memory. So, fifteen centuries before, 
 companies of half-civilised mercenaries from the 
 
 161 
 
152 The Prussian Hath Said in His Heart 
 
 marches of the Empire, and masses of savage 
 raiders from beyond its borders, may have passed 
 that same stream and seen before them the se- 
 curity and wealth of the Roman world with all 
 its rich possibilities of outrage and plunder. The 
 men that now followed in their track were 
 trained in an exact discipline and armed with 
 all the latest instruments of science. But such 
 differences could not prevent a thrill of recollec- 
 tion running through civilised Europe which had 
 seen the thing before. They were the Barbarians, 
 And they were returning. 
 
 They approached the first of the great fort- 
 resses which blocked their path. It was Li§ge. 
 They demanded its surrender. The thunder of 
 its guns answered them. It was the answer of 
 civilisation. Tiny Belgium, standing at the mo- 
 ment alone in the face of that immense aggres- 
 sion, felt her kinship with Europe, answered 
 for Europe, and placed Europe forever in her 
 debt. 
 
 Of the dreadful price at which Belgium pur- 
 chased imperishable glory I shall speak here 
 only so far as it is necessary to the understand- 
 ing of what Prussia is and why she must be de- 
 stroyed. There are no words that an English- 
 man can find in which to speak of Belgium and 
 
The Barbarians 153 
 
 all that we feel about her. I prefer to leave such 
 feeble words as I could use unwritten, and to 
 wait for the day when we may help her to see 
 her desire done upon her enemies. But one as- 
 pect of her martyrdom relates so closely to the 
 subject of this book that I may not pass it by. 
 No account of how Prussia makes war would be 
 complete without a corresponding picture of 
 how she wages it. 
 
 In the two pictures the same outstanding fea- 
 tures appear: a contempt of morals and a con- 
 tempt of honour. It is a favourite gambit of 
 the weak-minded Pacifist, who cannot even see 
 what an institution is before he begins to assail 
 it, to say that we must not complain of the out- 
 rages incidental to war, since war is itself an 
 outrage. Now war certainly involves the deliber- 
 ate infliction of physical pain and death ; and, if 
 you are a Materialist, and think physical pain 
 and death the worst conceivable evils, you are 
 entitled to say that, according to your philosophy, 
 war is itself an outrage. But unless you would 
 be a bigot as well as a Materialist, you must not 
 assume that all men accept your first principles 
 as self-evident; and you must recognise that a 
 doctrine which would condemn war has certainly 
 never been part of the Christian creed, any more 
 
154 The Prussian Hath Said in His Heart 
 
 than a doctrine which would justify outrages on 
 non-combatants has been part of the creed of the 
 European warrior. 
 
 War, as Christendom has always recognised it 
 as allowable, is an affair conducted under certain 
 strict rules. Some of these rules are dictated by 
 the claims of the Christian virtues of justice and 
 mercy. Others are dictated by that conception of 
 which I spoke in a previous chapter, which is not 
 in itself specifically a Christian virtue, but is nec- 
 essary to the practice of any high virtue, — the 
 conception of honour. The essence of that con- 
 ception is reciprocity. The rules may vary, but, 
 such as they are, they must be well-known and 
 apply to both sides. Each must be able to count 
 on the other observing them. Now the essence 
 of the Prussian theory is the denial of reciprocity. 
 The Prussian, as acknowledged Superior to the 
 race in general, claims in war, as in peace, to do 
 what he chooses, and at the same time counts, 
 as did Frederick the Great, on the advantage 
 which he will derive from other men being ham- 
 pered by scruples from which he is free. That 
 fundamental conception is the key to the whole 
 ghastly record of Prussian atrocities. 
 
 It is quite certain that the campaign in Bel- 
 gium and in Northern France has been conducted 
 
The Barbarians 155 
 
 by the Prussian military authorities with a sav- 
 age cruelty altogether inconsistent with the tra- 
 ditions of civilised warfare. I am not at all con- 
 cerned to deny that in this connection there has 
 been exaggeration and falsehood. Some stories 
 have been proved to be untrue, and others are of 
 such a nature as to raise doubts on their first 
 hearing. We may well admit that idle rumour, 
 journalistic love of sensation, and, even deliber- 
 ate falsehood and fraud (as often as not devised 
 by the enemy for the purpose of discrediting the 
 real case against the Prussian system ) have had 
 their share in many of the stories which are cur- 
 rent here. 
 
 But this does not touch the indisputable mini- 
 mum contained for instance, in the official Bel- 
 gian report, drawn up under the supervision of 
 men of unquestionable judgment and integrity, 
 including the Chief Justice of Belgium. Nor 
 does it touch the stories of eye-witnesses, includ- 
 ing some of our own soldiers as well as those who 
 have actually taken in mutilated Belgian chil- 
 dren, which we have all heard personally. Fi- 
 nally, it does not and cannot touch the official 
 admissions of the Prussian Govemmeni itself. 
 
 For that Government, at least until it was 
 scared into some measure of hypocrisy by the dis- 
 
156 The Prussian Hath Said in His Heart 
 
 gust of neutral nations and especially of the 
 United States, made no disguise of its ruthless 
 intentions. The Kaiser himself told his troops 
 that they must behave in conquered territories 
 with "a certain f rightfulness" ; and they have 
 done it. 
 
 On the gross offences against international 
 law, to which the Prussian official proclamations 
 themselves bear witness, it is unnecessary to com- 
 ment in detail. Let the following proclamation 
 admittedly issued by the military authorities 
 during their brief stay in Rheims, speak for it- 
 self:— 
 
 In the event of an action being fought either to-day 
 or in the immediate future in the neighbourhood of 
 Rheims, or in the town itself, the inhabitants are 
 warned that they must remain absolutely calm and 
 must in no way try to take part in the fighting. They 
 must not attempt to attack either isolated soldiers or 
 detachments of the German Army. The erection of 
 barricades, the taking up of paving stones in the streets 
 in a way to hinder the movements of the troops, or, 
 in a word, any action that may embarrass the German 
 Army is formally forbidden. 
 
 With a view to securing adequately the safety of the 
 troops and to instil calm into the population of 
 Rheims, the persons named below have been seized 
 as hostages by the Commander-in-Chief of the Ger- 
 man Army. These hostages will be hanged at the 
 slightest attempt at disorder. Also the town will be 
 
The Barbarians 157 
 
 totally or partly burnt and the inhabitants will be 
 hanged for any infraction of the above. 
 
 By Oeder of the German Authorities. 
 
 Then follow the names of eighty -one inhabitants 
 of Rheims, including four priests. 
 
 This document proves conclusively, if any 
 proof were wanted, that the atrocities committed 
 by the German armies are not the ordinary ex- 
 cesses or reprisals of soldiers, but are part of the 
 deliberate policy of the Prussian authorities. It 
 is unnecessary to emphasise the violation not only 
 of justice and humanity, but of intematiwial law 
 involved in the Rheims proclamation. It may be 
 doubted, indeed, whether the healthy conscience 
 of Europe really acquiesces in the Prussian claim, 
 that a man, defending his own home against a 
 foreign invader, should be treated as an assassin 
 if he is not in uniform; but that claim has, for 
 good or ill, been more or less admitted. The 
 Germans may plead some sort of sanction for 
 shooting the frane-tireur. But the franc-tirewr 
 is not here in question. 
 
 What the Prussians proposed to do was to 
 hang some eighty or more admittedly innocent 
 civilians, against whom no suspicion of hostile 
 action is even suggested, if certain other people, 
 over whom, being prisoners in the hands of the 
 
158 The Prussian Hath Said in His Heart 
 
 enemy, they cannot possibly exercise the smallest 
 control, resist the brutality of the invaders. 
 
 This is simply murder, and no sophistry can 
 make it anything else. It is earnestly to be 
 hoped that wherever such a diabolical crime as is 
 here shamelessly avowed as the intention of the 
 Prussian authorities is committed, the officers 
 responsible will be marked and, when captured, 
 will be dealt with as murderers. 
 
 The Prussian theory and practice is quite sim- 
 ple and logical. Morals being as inapplicable to 
 war as to diplomacy, no considerations should 
 enter into the conduct of a war except a calcula- 
 tion of the material factors likely to promote suc- 
 cess. Now in the present war it was of the es- 
 sence of the Prussian plan of campaign to strike 
 an instant and overwhelming blow at France. 
 The resistance of Belgium was an obstacle. To 
 overcome that obstacle by the thorough military 
 conquest and occupation of Belgium meant de- 
 lay, and it meant the employment of men who 
 were needed for the projected march on Paris. 
 Therefore Belgium must be held, not by a regular 
 military occupation, but by a reign of terror 
 sufficiently savage to cow its inhabitants into 
 submission. 
 
 I am not saying for a moment that, even from 
 
The Barbarians 159 
 
 an unmoral point of view, such a policy is wise. 
 I believe on the contrary, that, like all the de- 
 velopments of the modern Prussian mind, it is 
 tainted with a kind of madness which is the 
 nemesis of a divorce from instinctive morals. 
 But I also think that it involves a complete mis- 
 understanding of the way in which the Christian 
 conscience works in Europeans. The Prussian, 
 with his "Master Morality" and "Slave Moral- 
 ity," virtually divides the human race into bullies 
 and cowards. He did not appear to be aware, 
 until this war had broken out and had been car- 
 ried to a certain point, that any other kind of 
 man existed. Possibly that truth is beginning to 
 dawn on him now. Before the war is over he may 
 begin to realise that Christendom is essentially a 
 military thing ; not a sheep, but a lion. I think 
 that history will see that it would have paid the 
 Prussians much better to have treated Belgium 
 with greatest respect and consideration, and to 
 have refrained from inflicting any hardships not 
 inseparable from the state of war. Had they 
 done so it is quite possible that there would have 
 been many Belgians who would have been in- 
 clined to say that enough had been done for 
 honour, and that further resistance could not 
 reasonably be expected of them. As it is, there 
 
160 The Prussian Hath Said in His Heart 
 
 is no Belgian, and for a matter of that no Eng- 
 lishman or FrenchmaQ, who has not had the hor- 
 rors of the Prussian occupation, the slaughtered 
 non-combatants, the desecrated churches, the 
 outraged women and the mutilated children, 
 branded into his mind, and who does not feel that 
 it would be unspeakable if peace were made until 
 Prussia had paid to the last farthing for her 
 crimes. 
 
 The atrocities were not wisely calculated, btit 
 they were calculated. They were part of a de- 
 liberate policy pursued for a definite reason. 
 Only when we have grasped this does the story 
 become a plain and credible one. The horrors 
 perpetrated in Belgium and later in Northern 
 France must always remain unintelligible (and 
 therefore difficult to believe) to those who do not 
 perceive that horror was the effect aimed at. 
 
 Why, it may be asked, select for military exe- 
 cution or worse the most obviously helpless and 
 harmless of non-combatants, the very people 
 whose presence and activities could not possibly 
 constitute a military danger? Why make such a 
 specialty of shooting priests? Why murder and 
 outrage women? Why massacre or mutilate 
 young children? How can the village cure be 
 an obstacle to your 17 in. howitzers? How can 
 
The Barbarians 161 
 
 old women and young girls resist the Prussian 
 Guard? How can the cutting off of a baby's fin- 
 gers or the gouging of one of its eyes help your 
 plan of campaign? Do you expect the war to 
 last till it grows up? 
 
 To all this the real Prussian answer is simple : 
 "These things horrify you. That is why we do 
 them. The congregation regard the priest as a 
 holy man ; therefore his death ( the more if he is 
 innocent of any offence) will impress their mem- 
 ories. Women in civilised war are held sacred; 
 therefore we murder and outrage them to show 
 that we are not waging civilised war. The help- 
 lessness of a child appeals irresistibly to human 
 hearts; therefore we cut off its fingers to show 
 that we are not human. Call us Supermen, call 
 us Devils ; it does not matter so long as you are 
 afraid of us. The more you think we are Devils, 
 the less likely you are to come within a mile of us, 
 and your fear of our devilry will be a better pro- 
 tection of our lines of communication than three 
 or four army corps could afford." 
 
 What I have said of the murder and mutilation 
 of non-combatants applies also to the destruction 
 of public and ancient buildings, the bombard- 
 ment of undefended towns and the like. These 
 also were in most instances not spontaneous, but 
 
162 The Prussian Hath Said in His Heart 
 
 calculated. The calculation was this: "The 
 Belgians value their historic monuments and will 
 dislike their being destroyed. If we choose the 
 one which they hold most sacred, every other 
 town which possesses and values similar treas- 
 ures will be put in fear. We will bum Louvain, 
 taking special care to destroy its valuable library. 
 Then such towns as Ghent, Bruges, Brussels it- 
 self, Antwerp will be the less likely to offer re- 
 sistance, if we should need to occupy them. That 
 Louvain has not in fact offered any resistance 
 does not matter in the least. Its fate, innocent 
 or guilty, will be equally an example to others. 
 It will create terror; and that is all we want." 
 And as a fact the Prussian action does seem to 
 have produced the desired result in the case of 
 certain Belgian cities, such as Ghent, which de- 
 sired to avoid the wholesale demolition of the 
 memorials of their past. 
 
 All this is what distinguishes Prussian atroci- 
 ties from those excesses which occur from time 
 to time in all wars when troops get out of hand. 
 The Prussian troops, in most cases, did not do 
 these things because they were out of hand, but 
 because they were only too well in hand. The 
 Kaiser himself had told his officers to create "a 
 certain frightfulness" in Belgium. These officers, 
 
The Barbarians 163 
 
 who had studied the military text books of their 
 country, and knew exactly what he meant, passed 
 on the order in more concrete form and in greater 
 detail to their soldiers. The soldiers in their 
 turn obeyed. I have no doubt that in many cases 
 both officers and soldiers obeyed unwillingly. 
 They obeyed because they were in the frame of 
 mind which all Prussian discipline works to pro- 
 duce; because they were afraid to disobey. 
 Every one who values the chivalric element in 
 war prefers to admire his enemy, and one is there- 
 fore glad to note the several occasions upon 
 which, according to reliable testimony, the Ger- 
 man soldiers really did "get out of hand" and 
 behaved like decent and kindly Europeans. In 
 the German Navy, when no special orders for 
 atrocities appear to have been issued, the Ger- 
 man record seems to be clean and honourable, 
 as well as being, when all the circumstances are 
 considered, highly distinguished. 
 
 I have said so much of the atrocity of the Prus- 
 sian spirit that I have hardly left myself space 
 to speak of its other and much less important 
 quality, which is also the consequence of its 
 loss, or rather repudiation, of the idea of "hon- 
 our," its curious vulgarity. But that quality is 
 very apparent whether in the Emperor's crude 
 
164 The Prussian Hath Said in His Heart 
 
 and effeminate sneers at Ms "contemptible" ene- 
 mies, or in the action of his son, the heir to the 
 Prussian throne, who when ensconced in a French 
 country house, takes the opportunity to make 
 away with the family plate after the fashion of a 
 common burglar. Morals apart, what has become 
 of the common sense of human dignity in royal 
 personages who do such things? The answer is 
 that it has gone the way of chivalry, humanity and 
 honour, as result of that denial of the reciprocal 
 rights of man and man which is the Prussian first 
 principle. The Crown Prince doubtless thinks 
 that in looting peaceful houses he is showing 
 himself in the light of a splendid and renowned 
 conqueror. The only answer is that civilised 
 people do not feel like that. 
 
 We may take it, then, that the atrocities of the 
 Prussians are in the main calculated and de- 
 liberately ordered. 
 
 Nevertheless, the fact remains that human na- 
 ture is so made that if you force men on pain of 
 death or savage punishment to behave like devils 
 the probable result in most cases will be, that, if 
 they obey you, they become like devils. I have 
 already pointed out that the twisting of the moral 
 instincts which the whole Prussian system in- 
 
The Barbarians 165 
 
 Tolves, tends to produce that fearful moral dis- 
 ease which we call perversion. If this is so with 
 civilians, it is much more so with soldiers, for the 
 traditions of the profession of arms are chival- 
 rous, and a soldier sins against his nature much 
 more by such acts as the slaughter of women and 
 children than an ordinary man would. 
 
 There is a certain ironical fitness in the fact 
 that the Prussian Government selected the no- 
 torious Dr. Moll, one of its academic and official 
 apologists for perversion, to write a report on 
 "the state of mind of the Belgian people." His 
 conclusion, so far as I remember, was that the 
 Belgians were suffering from a "collective 
 hallucination," the result of their "illiteracy" 
 and of the unaccustomed "excitement" produced 
 by the appearance of armed Prussians in their 
 midst. I am not sure whether the Prussians 
 themselves were part of the hallucination, or 
 whether the Prussians were really present, only 
 the Belgians falsely imagined them to be cutting 
 off children's fingers when they were really only 
 shaking hands with them. In any case, one 
 might doubt Dr. Moll's ability to investigate the 
 psychology of decent Christian folk. If he had 
 turned his attention to the psychology of the 
 
166 The Prussian Hath Said in His Heart 
 
 Prussian officers and soldiers he might have 
 found a subject more suitable to his talents and 
 more consonant with his former studies. 
 
 For it seems certain that the element of per- 
 verted malice mingled with that of deliberate 
 political calculation in the case of many outrages 
 both on human beings and on historic monu- 
 ments. To take the less grave case of the latter : 
 while the burning of Louvain seems to have had 
 a definite object, — the intimidation of the other 
 historic Belgian towns where the Prussians 
 wished to establish an undisputed dominion, — 
 the bombardment of Rheims Cathedral, though it 
 must have been ordered by a high authority — 
 seems to have been purely wanton. The lie that 
 a post of observation had been stationed on the 
 tower has been refuted by the French War Of- 
 fice, but it hardly needed refutation. The fact 
 that it was not put forward until several days 
 had passed and until several other and quite 
 contradictory explanations of the incident had 
 been given, stamps it as an afterthought. On 
 the other hand, the deliberation with which shells 
 were aimed at the noblest of all the heritages 
 of Christendom is fully proved. There seems to 
 have been no possible motive, political or mili- 
 tary, for the outrage. It must have been simply 
 
The Barbarians 167 
 
 malicious ; that is to say, it proceeded from an 
 evil will. 
 
 And yet there was a sense in which these Prus- 
 sian soldiers were right. In attacking the 
 monuments of the old civic freedom in Flanders 
 and the monuments of the old European religion 
 in France they were really attacking their enemy, 
 the enemy which stands behind Cossack lances 
 and French "75's" and British bayonets, the 
 enemy that will conquer them at last: the soul 
 of Europe. 
 
 Let me resume my narrative. The German 
 armies swept on through devastated Belgium, 
 through northern France, up to the very gates of 
 Paris. While their left wing threatened the city 
 where more than a thousand years before Count 
 Robert had held his own against the Danes, their 
 centre swept southward across the Mame. And 
 still the Allies retired. 
 
 But they were fighting in a country full of 
 the memories of resistance. Behind them was 
 Rheims, where Joan of Arc brought a King to 
 be crowned. To their left was Valmy, where the 
 great Prussian charge, which should have 
 crushed the Revolution, faltered and failed. A 
 little way in front of them the waters of the 
 
168 The Prussian Hath Said in His Heart 
 
 Aube wound through fields where Danton had 
 played as a child. And in the midst of their line 
 of march stood the Camp of Attila. 
 
 It was on the Feast of Our Lady's Nativity 
 when they reached this country, so full of great 
 memories, that the French General fell suddenly 
 on their flank with a great reseiTe force whose 
 onslaught saved Paris. 
 
 The Barbarians were driven back across the 
 Marne, past Rheims, across the Aisne, step by 
 step towards the darkness out of which they 
 came. 
 
CHAPTER VIII 
 
 '^'^THOU SHALT NOT SUFFER A WITCH TO LIVE" 
 
 I NOW come to the practical part of this book. I 
 have endeavoured to trace the history of Prus- 
 sian policy from the days of Frederick the Great 
 to the time of writing, and to show why, if Eu- 
 rope was not to perish, a European combination 
 formed for the purpose of disarming Prussia was 
 inevitable. From that argument a clear practi- 
 cal moral is to be derived, and it is my intention 
 to attempt to enforce that moral in the present 
 chapter. 
 
 I shall assume the ultimate victory of the 
 Allies. I think myself justified in doing so 
 (though the "inevitable" victory is an unchival- 
 rous and unmilitary conception) for three rea- 
 sons. Firstly, every one of the Allies has staked 
 almost its existence as an independent nation on 
 the issue of the war, and is therefore bound to 
 go on fighting to its last man ; and two of them at 
 least are in a position to carry on the struggle 
 indefinitely, and would be bound for their own 
 
 169 
 
170 The Prussian Hath Said in His Heart 
 
 sake to do so. Secondly, the complete failure of 
 the Prussian attempt to crush France before the 
 pressure of Eussia began to be felt, implies the 
 failure of the calculation upon which the Prus- 
 sians themselves relied for success. Thirdly, it 
 is no good discussing what would happen to Eu- 
 rope in the event of an ultimate Prussian victory, 
 because, in that event, there would be no Europe 
 for anything to happen to. 
 
 I assume, therefore, a victory for the Allies; 
 and directly that victory begins to take bodily 
 shape, I perceive a peril against which all of them 
 must be on their guard, but which especially af- 
 fects England. 
 
 We say, and say justly, that for the purposes 
 of this war we English are a united people. 
 That statement is true of us to-day as it was 
 never true of us in relation to any public question 
 which has been agitated within living memory. 
 It is not that, as was the case during the South 
 African War, there is a large majority in favour 
 of the war and a comparatively small minority 
 opposed to it. The whole nation is in favour of 
 the war; those opposed to it are simply indi- 
 viduals who have, for one reason or another, been 
 temporarily or permanently de-nationalised. 
 Those who cannot conceive of such a state of 
 
"Thmu Shalt not Suffer a Witch to Live" 171 
 
 things are simply those to whom the word De- 
 mocracy has never had any real meaning. Real 
 democracy would mean government not by arti- 
 ficial electioneering majorities, but by just such 
 corporate acts of the national will. 
 
 Nevertheless, it would be an error not to realise 
 that there is a distinction to be drawn in this 
 respect between our case and that of most of our 
 Allies. Of France, for instance, it would at this 
 moment be true to say that all Frenchmen (un- 
 less they are actually traitors) have at this mo- 
 ment a single will. That a particular French- 
 man happens to be a Catholic or a Freethinker, 
 a Socialist or a Eoyalist, makes no difference to 
 his attitude, any more than such variations of 
 opinion and creed would make any difference to 
 a man's desire to knock out of the hands of an 
 assassin the pistol which is being held to his head. 
 Any Frenchman who were at this moment to offer 
 public opposition to the war would certainly be 
 killed. Only the other day we had a conspicuous 
 illustration of the national temper. M. Anatole 
 France, for many years a protagonist of Pacifism, 
 had, while warmly supporting the war, ventured 
 to repeat some of the old futile, but (in the par- 
 ticular circumstances) more or less treasonable, 
 rubbish about "international solidarity." He 
 
172 The Prussian Hath Said in His Heart 
 
 was instantly denounced and (very characteris- 
 tically) denounced with special vehemence by 
 Gustav Herve, the whilom apostle of anti-mili- 
 tarism, and had to purge himself by offering his 
 services at the age of seventy as a soldier. The 
 same temper of unanimity would certainly be 
 found in Belgium, and, I should guess, in Serbia. 
 In Kussia you might find, perhaps, a few un- 
 national eccentrics prepared to oppose the war. 
 But that is because Russia, like this country, is 
 thought to be more or less immune from really 
 serious invasion. 
 
 Thanks to our fleet, we, for the most part, be- 
 lieve ourselves to be safe from any actual in- 
 vasion by the German army, and from the conse- 
 quent repetition in Kent or Essex of the scenes 
 which Flanders and Champagne have witnessed. 
 I fancy that if there were a serious naval dis- 
 aster, or a raid upon our coasts, the populace 
 would make very short work of the Pacifists. 
 While, however, we feel fairly secure we are not 
 prepared to proceed to extremes, and such men 
 are suffered to write and phampleteer and even 
 to venture on speechmaking without serious 
 molestation. 
 
 The same sense of security leads us to tolerate, 
 as certainly no other nation would tolerate, the 
 
"Thou Shalt not Suffer a Witch to Live" 173 
 
 immunity which our Government extends to men 
 of German birth and associations ; men who have 
 been and in some cases still are powerful in 
 finance and politics; men who, if they are not 
 actually betraying the country, are at any rate 
 not likely to be whole heartedly hostile to our 
 present enemies. 
 
 Now I am decidedly of opinion that the 
 toleration of the mere harmless, eccentric Pacifist 
 is wise; and, though I think the toleration of 
 the alien or semi-alien financier and plutocrat 
 suicidal folly, I do not imagine that such men, 
 whatever other harm they may be doing to us, 
 are able at the present time to deflect in any 
 serious manner the direction of our national 
 policy. But the danger arising from the exist- 
 ence of these two groups may appear later. 
 
 So long as the issue remains in any way doubt- 
 ful, and especially so long as this country is in 
 any danger, one may feel pretty well assured 
 that proposals for an insufficient peace will fall 
 upon deaf ears. But we cannot be so sure that 
 this will be so after a victory, or a series of vic- 
 tories, which may appear to make the triumph of 
 the Allies an assured event. 
 
 I believe that the great mass of Englishmen 
 are determined that this war shall not end until 
 
174 The Prussian Hath Said in His Heart 
 
 our principal enemy is utterly broken and dis- 
 armed. But unfortunately in normal circum- 
 stances (and circumstances in the conditions I 
 have presumed, would be reverting towards the 
 normal) it is not so much the opinions of the 
 mass of Englishmen that will count as the opin- 
 ions (or interests) of certain groups of wealthy 
 men. And there is, unhappily, a great deal of 
 money and what is euphemistically called "in- 
 fluence," which is ready to be mobilised on the 
 Pacifist side as soon as circumstances appear 
 favourable. 
 
 Take the case of the Press. Practically the 
 whole English Press is governed by a few rich 
 men. It is at the moment unanimously patriotic. 
 But it would be sheer folly to forget that up to 
 the very moment when war was declared there 
 was a considerable section of it that was sympa- 
 thetic with our enemies. 
 
 The Daily News and the Star are the property 
 of a rich cocoa-manufacturer, who happens to in- 
 herit along with his wealth the religious faith of 
 a curious seventeenth-century sect, which among 
 the madnesses of that age (such as that of the 
 Adamites, who went about naked to prove their 
 innocence) developed the fantastic idea that 
 Christianity forbade an appeal to arms. Up to 
 
"Them Shalt not Sufer a Witch to Live" 175 
 
 the very moment of the outbreak of war the 
 Daily 'News was fiercely pro-German, not only 
 denouncing Sir Edward Grey's diplomacy, but 
 printing from day to day letters from Liberal 
 M.P.'s and others protesting against our inter- 
 vention, among the names appended being the sig- 
 nificant one of Mr. Neil Primrose, a "Liberal 
 Imperialist'' by profession, but also a Rothschild 
 by blood. Even the determination of Prussia to 
 violate the neutrality of Belgium did not appar- 
 ently satisfy the Cocoa Trust that our action was 
 legitimate, and the first leading article that ap- 
 peared in its organ on the outbreak of war, ex- 
 pressed an only slightly chastened protest. It 
 was not till a few days later that the Daily 
 News professed a complete conversion, — the con- 
 tents of the Ofiftcial White Paper being offered to 
 account for it. We were all glad of the change 
 which bore testimony to the absolute unanimity 
 with which the nation stood behind the Govern- 
 ment. But it is impossible to avoid asking one- 
 self the question : Might not another conversion, 
 equally sudden and miraculous, appear as the 
 first result of a decisive victory of the Allies? 
 Add to these powerful newspaper proprietors 
 the number of great financiers of German birth 
 or family connections to whom I have alluded 
 
176 The Prussian Hath Said in His Heart 
 
 (the Chairman of one of our greatest English 
 Banks was born a German; and another born 
 German who has actually a brother in Frankfort, 
 advising the Prussian Government and another 
 brother in New York, patronising and financing 
 the anti-English campaign in that city, is virtual 
 master of London's Transit) and it will be obvi- 
 ous that there is plenty of influential backing 
 available for a Pacifist campaign when the right 
 moment arrives. As to the lines upon which such 
 a campaign might be developed we have a signifi- 
 cant hint from an incident which occurred in 
 the quite early days of the war. 
 
 On September 10th this year the Morning 
 Post published a circular which had been secretly 
 sent out to those who were, as we may suppose, 
 regarded as suitable recipients. It bore the fol- 
 lowing signatures: "J. Ramsay Macdonald," 
 "Charles Trevelyan," "Norman Angell" and "E. 
 D. Morel," who is described as "Hon. Sec. and 
 Treasurer {pro tern.)." It contains, of course, a 
 great deal of irrelevant verbiage, but we shall 
 not be far wrong if we consider the third pro- 
 posed object of the movement as the gravamen 
 of the whole document. It ran as follows : "To 
 aim at securing such terms that this war will 
 not, either through the humiliation of the de- 
 
"Thou Shalt not Suffer a Witch to Live" 177 
 
 feated nation or an artificial rearrangement of 
 frontiers, merely become the starting point for 
 new national antagonisms and future wars." As 
 to the means by which William II and his Prus- 
 sian entourage were to be spared the "humilia- 
 tion" which — though perhaps less painful than 
 the fate of the inhabitants of Louvain — would 
 yet gall their humane and sensitive souls, I may 
 quote the following very significant passage : — 
 
 When the time is ripe for it, but not before the 
 country is secure from danger, meetings will be or- 
 ganised and speakers provided. But the immediate 
 need is in our opinion to prepare for the issue of books, 
 pamphlets, and leaflets dealing with the course of 
 recent policy and suggesting the lines of action for the 
 future. Measures are being taken to prepare these 
 at once and they will be ready for publication when 
 the proper opportunity occurs. For this purpose we 
 shall be glad of any subscription which you can spare, 
 and would like to know if you are willing to support 
 us in this effort, in order that we may communicate 
 with you as occasion arises. 
 
 I do not profess to know when the signatories 
 of this document, would in the ordinary course of 
 things, have considered the time "ripe" for the 
 prosecution of their activities without personal 
 risk. But I fancy that the premature exposure 
 of the plot by the Morning Post led to the pre- 
 mature publication a week later of an official 
 
178 The Prussian Hath Said in His Heart 
 
 manifesto, to which were appended the same sig- 
 natures with the additional name of Mr. Arthur 
 Ponsonby, M.P. 
 
 A comparison between these two documents is 
 very suggestive. We have seen that in the secret 
 application for funds made, it may be presumed, 
 to wealthy men of pro-German sympathies, 
 prominence was given to the desirability of spar- 
 ing the enemy "humiliation." From the public 
 manifesto this passage, which is the key to the 
 whole, is deleted, and we are left with nothing but 
 platitudes about "democracy" and "nationality," 
 the need of a permanent peace, the impropriety 
 of transferring populations from one State to 
 another against their will (this from the apolo- 
 gists of Prussia!) and the wickedness of what is 
 called "secret diplomacy." Some of the obser- 
 vations made are just, others are somewhat fool- 
 ish and visionary, others may be regarded as 
 sound or unsound according to the precise mean- 
 ing to be put upon their very vague and obscure 
 phraseology. Had we had nothing but this pub- 
 lic appeal by which to judge, we should account 
 it a hasty excursion into international politics 
 on the part of well-meaning amateurs who had 
 not the knowledge and experience to understand 
 them. But its real meaning, to which all this 
 
"Thm Shalt not Suffer a Witch to Live" 179 
 
 hazy idealism is only intended to lead up, is to 
 be found in the suppressed clause which I have 
 quoted from the real manifesto of the signatories, 
 — the manifesto on which they hoped to get their 
 money. 
 
 Now I am not suggesting that the signatories 
 themselves are likely ever to be in a position to 
 do this country grave injury. I do not under- 
 rate their abilities. Mr. Macdonald is an astute 
 intriguer, who for years "led" the "Labour 
 Party," — on more than one occasion into the 
 enemy's camp. The gentleman who signs him- 
 self "Norman Angell" — a certain Mr. Lane, I be- 
 lieve, — ^is certainly the ablest of Lord North- 
 cliffe's journalistic pupils, and has acquired a 
 great reputation (in Carmelite Street) as an orig- 
 inal thinker on the strength of a crude re-state- 
 ment, without acknowledgment, of some of 
 the less well-founded conclusions of the late 
 Richard Cobden. Mr. Morel has for years spe- 
 cialised in anti-Belgian and anti-French agita- 
 tions, all of them more or less favourable to 
 German interests and supported by funds the 
 source of which he has obstinately refused to 
 disclose. There is, therefore, nothing surprising 
 in finding him "Hon. Sec. [pro tern.") of an anti- 
 English agitation, now that England and Ger- 
 
180 The Prussian Hath Said in His Heart 
 
 many are at war. As for Messrs. Trevelyan and 
 Ponsonby, their adhesion to the doctrines of the 
 manifesto is probably more single-minded than 
 that of their colleagues; and their names at 
 least suffice to give those colleagues the entree to 
 the governing class. But the real danger, as I 
 have said, lies in the power of the very wealthy 
 men who may at any time be prepared to back 
 these men in their attempts, at a critical moment, 
 to confuse their issue. 
 
 Of course, it may be said that Great Britain has 
 bound herself to her allies not to make a separate 
 peace, and that therefore the most strenuous ef- 
 forts that the Pacifists may make in this country 
 will in any case be nullified by the determination 
 of France and Eussia to make an end forever of 
 the Prussian menace. That is perfectly true, but 
 most of us would not be content to see England 
 a passive and negligible factor in the settlement 
 which is to follow this war. England more than 
 any of the Allies, more even than France or 
 Belgium, is fighting for her life. England (with 
 Scotland and Ireland) will be putting more and 
 more men into the field so long as the war lasts, 
 and will thus be in the advantageous position 
 of being relatively stronger at its end than at its 
 beginning. We want the influence of England to 
 
"Them Shalt not Suffer a Witch to Live" 181 
 
 be felt, and we^ish it to be felt as a force mak- 
 ing for the final and decisive overthrow of that 
 enemy which is especially hers as well as Eu- 
 rope's. 
 
 Now, for myself, directly I saw from a compari- 
 son of their expurgated and unexpurgated mani- 
 festos what line the Pacifists were likely to adopt 
 as soon as they thought it prudent to take the 
 field in earnest, I saw that there was only one 
 way in which such tactics could effectively be 
 met. It was no earthly good trying to meet the 
 vague and declamatory aspirations after "peace" 
 and "democracy" with successive rebuttals. 
 Moreover, some of these aspirations were in them- 
 selves reasonable and desirable, while an explana- 
 tion of the obvious difficulties involved would be 
 tedious, and from the point of view of popular 
 propaganda altogether ineffective. It was not 
 what these people publicly asked for that was 
 objectionable or even dangerous : it was what they 
 privately wanted. What that was, thanks to the 
 Morning Post and its revelations, we were in a 
 position to know. They wanted to save Prussia 
 and its King from "humiliation." It would be 
 unreasonable to expect democrats like Mr. Mac- 
 donald to feel for the humiliation of any one be- 
 low the rank of an Emperor! But I, with my 
 
182 The Prussian Hath Said in His Heart 
 
 i 
 
 thoughts fixed on the humiliation, the oppression/ 
 the mutilation and torture of a dozen free anij 
 gallant peoples from the Poles to the Belgians, 
 wanted Prussia not only humiliated but de- 
 stroyed. And the only way to assist the ac- 
 complishment of such an end seemed to be to 
 show the people of this country what Prussia 
 was, and why her continued existence was an 
 insult to God and Man. 
 
 That is what in this book I have tried to ac- 
 complish. How far I have succeeded I know 
 not, but at least if I have made my readers see 
 Prussia at all as I see her, they will have no 
 difficulty in evading any diversions which her 
 friends in England and elsewhere may seek in 
 her interests to create. 
 
 Scipio Africanus, we are told, was in the habit 
 of concluding all his speeches, no matter what 
 might be the subject of debate, with the remark : 
 "And in my opinion Carthage should be de- 
 stroyed," — followed, one may suppose, by a hasty 
 resumption of his seat before the Speaker could 
 call him to order ! I recommend a similar policy 
 whenever Mr. Morel, Mr. Lane and the rest may 
 consider the time "ripe" for confusing the issue 
 in the interests of Prussia. We need not argue 
 with them on the side-issues which they will try 
 
"Thou Shalt not Suffer a Witch to Live" 183 
 
 to thrust under our notice. We may accept much 
 that they say, — all that they say, if we choose. 
 But we must in each case add Scipio's comment. 
 
 They may say: "Secret diplomacy is the 
 enemy. Is it not deplorable that nations should 
 be involved in a course of foreign policy to which 
 they have never been asked to assent?" And 
 we shall answer, "Most deplorable. But at the 
 moment we are not engaged in diplomacy but in 
 war. And Prussia must be destroyed." 
 
 They may say: "Shall not every nation be 
 consulted as to its own future destiny ?" And we 
 shall answer: "Yes, every nation except Prus- 
 sia,-— which must be destroyed." 
 
 They may say: "Germany has her own con- 
 tribution to make to the common civilisation of 
 Europe. Think of all that we owe to her ! Think 
 of her quaint legends and kindly ceremonies. 
 Think of the music of Beethoven, the poetry of 
 Schiller, the philosophy of Kant, the art of Al- 
 bert Dtirer! Shall not these things endure to 
 be a joy to countless generations yet to come?" 
 And we shall answer: "May they endure and 
 have due honour forever — after Prussia is de- 
 stroyed." 
 
 And finally they may say : "After this dread- 
 ful war is over, shall there not be universal peace 
 
184 The Prussian Hath Said in His Heart 
 
 and good will among men forever?" And we, 
 perceiving their thoughts shall answer : "What 
 hast thou to do with peace, O Apologist for Devil- 
 try? Get thee behind me! Prussia must be de- 
 stroyed !" 
 
 Prussia is already judged by her peers, and 
 judged justly. On their conscience and honour 
 they find her worthy of death. In the name of 
 that very principle of nationality for which they 
 are fighting, they pronounce one nation — ^if it 
 be a nation — unfit to live. 
 
 It will be said — ^it has been said time and 
 again by Pacifist writers and speakers — that 
 their own hands are not clean. They are not. 
 There is not one of them that has not done in- 
 numerable wicked things, — the wickedest thing 
 being, perhaps, the aid which each, at one time or 
 another, has given to this universal enemy of 
 European civilisation and Christian morals. 
 For that sin, each is paying in the agony of the 
 present war, in the toll of her dead and the sor- 
 row of her mourners. And it need not be denied 
 that on the record of England, of France, of Rus- 
 sia, there are many stains. Each has often and 
 often chosen evil rather than good. But none 
 save Prussia has ever said: "Evil be thou my 
 Good." For the nation or the man who does that 
 
"Thou Shalt not Suffer a Witch to Live" 185 
 
 there remains only the terrible words which I 
 have chosen as the title of this chapter. The 
 repentant sinner may not have the right to 
 judge other sinners ; but he has a right to judge 
 the warlock. And Europe, with all her sins on 
 her head, has a right to judge Prussia. 
 
 I have hinted that Prussia is hardly to be 
 called a nation. It is rather an institution ani- 
 mated by a certain spirit, and a certain creed. 
 In whatsoever things that spirit and creed may 
 be inherent, a dynasty, an army, a political sys- 
 tem, a caste — those things must, at the end of 
 this war, cease to exist. From whatever federa- 
 tion or grouping of states it may be suitable to 
 create in the Germanies, everything Prussian 
 must be excluded. Prussian rulers must never 
 again have access to the wealth of stolen prov- 
 inces, like Silesia and Westphalia, on which to 
 build great armies and fleets. The Prussians 
 must be hedged and confined within those cold 
 deserts from which their kings first set out on a 
 career of outrage and loot. They must have no 
 army, no fleet, no fortifications, no resources 
 which would enable them to do further mischief 
 to their neighbours or challenge again in arms 
 the common morals of Christendom. 
 
 Nothing short of such a policy will really jus- 
 
186 The Prussian Hath Said in His Heart 
 
 tify the vast sacrifices and awful perils of this 
 war. To leave Prussia merely defeated with the 
 loss of this or that province, and the imposition 
 of this or that indemnity, would be to ask her to 
 take up her evil work again on the morrow. 
 Prussia, for all her boasting, has been defeated 
 before, but never before has Europe had the 
 same full determination to make the defeat final 
 and irrevocable. We cannot be content with 
 merely weakening Prussia: we must take such 
 steps as shall forever prevent her from recovering 
 her strength. Nor would the dethronement, or 
 exile, or death of any one man ever touch the 
 problem. As I have already said : it is against no 
 living men that we are really making war. 
 
 Among the dark and frightful legends of Satan- 
 ism there is none more hideous than that of the 
 Vampire. According to this strange tradition or 
 fancy a human being could, by compact with 
 the Powers of Darkness, purchase a horrible 
 terrestrial immorality by draining secretly the 
 blood of his fellow-creatures. No ordinary 
 weapon could kill such a being; he was immune 
 from rope and sword, fire and water. The lost 
 soul could only be driven from the body to the 
 Hell prepared for it by means of ceremonies al- 
 
"Them Shalt not Sufer a Witch to Live" 187 
 
 most as ghastly as the terrors which they sought 
 to exorcise. 
 
 Those who have tried to follow the story of 
 Europe since the middle of the eighteenth century 
 can almost see such a being moving across its 
 darkened face. The foul spirit seems to take hu- 
 man form, now in one man, now in another. 
 These men die, but the spirit is not laid. Con- 
 tinually it reappears, sucking the life of nations, 
 leaving in its track broken and bloodless corpses 
 where had been happy races and free families. It 
 is doomed to death many times, and great armies 
 with sword and cannon are brought against it, 
 and they win or lose, and go to their homes ; but 
 it does not die. 
 
 When the victorious Allies meet at last at the 
 cross-roads of Europe, they will find many huge 
 and difficult tasks concerning the remaking of 
 Christendom to test their strength and wisdom. 
 But one task must come before all others: the 
 driving of the dreadful stake through the heart 
 of Frederick the Second. 
 
CHAPTER IX 
 
 AFTER THE WAR 
 
 We have not infrequently heard of late a cer- 
 tain expression about this war; it is a specially 
 favourite one with newly-converted Pacifists, 
 who are naturally unwilling to confess that their 
 past professions and ideals were wholly illusory. 
 This, it is said, is a war to end war. 
 
 For myself, I do not think that a good de- 
 scription either of the object or of the probable 
 results of the present tremendous contest. I do 
 not think it is a war to end war: I think it 
 might be more fitly described as a war to end a 
 certain kind of peace — the peace of Prussia that 
 passeth all abhorrence. 
 
 It is a curious symptom of the decay of clear 
 thinking in this age of ours that people seem no 
 longer able to distinguish between special and 
 acute evils afflicting some particular unhappy 
 society and the ordinary imperfections common 
 to all human societies. We can still see the dis- 
 
 188 
 
After The War 189 
 
 tinction — though even this Eugenists are busily 
 trying to make us lose sight of it— in matters af- 
 fecting bodily well-being. When a doctor tells 
 us that if we follow a certain treatment we shall 
 be well soon, we do not understand him to be 
 promising a body immune henceforth from all 
 physical ills, or even a state of ideally perfect 
 health in the near future. We take him to mean 
 merely that the particular thing that is specially 
 the matter with us at the moment will no longer 
 afflict us. But we have forgotten that the same 
 thing holds good of the diseases of societies. 
 Thus you will find men citing the fact that in all 
 ages and nations there have always been inequal- 
 ities of income as an argument for regarding the 
 monstrous and insane distribution of wealth 
 which we see around us to-day — a thing probably 
 never paralleled in the world before, and cer- 
 tainly at no time save in the last stages of na- 
 tional decline — as a thing normal and unalter- 
 able by human wisdom ; while, on the other hand, 
 if you say that to make a happy and secure com- 
 munity it is desirable that virtually all families 
 should own property, you will be challenged by 
 Socialists and others to show that under such a 
 system you could guarantee a permanent and 
 mathematically equal division of material wealth 
 
190 The Prussian Hath Said in His Heart 
 
 — a thing which no nation has ever either at- 
 tained or desired. The same kind of people will 
 think that if you defend the institution of mar- 
 riage you are maintaining that all marriages are 
 ideally happy. They will also tell you that "al- 
 cohol" is a poison, and deduce that ale ought to 
 be treated like prussic acid. 
 
 There is just the same lack of the power to dis- 
 tinguish between the normal and the abnormal 
 in much of the talk we hear about "Militarism." 
 Defenders of the war — especially those who have 
 a Pacifist past to explain away — say that we are 
 fighting to put down "German Militarism." 
 Whereupon the unconverted Pacifists retort that 
 we have "Militarism" here, and that so have the 
 French and the Kussians. And then the repent- 
 ant Pacifist perhaps says : "Yes : but our Mili- 
 tarism is not so bad as German Militarism." 
 And then we have a discussion as to whether 
 Kussian Militarism is not worse than German 
 Militarism. And, meanwhile, no one thinks of 
 asking what exact meaning is to the word Mili- 
 tarism. Still less does any one find it necessary 
 to state clearly what there was abnormal about 
 the armed force of Prussia, and why Europe will 
 be in a happier and healthier condition when it 
 is shattered for ever. 
 
After The War 191 
 
 When Prussia set out to deny the existence 
 of any common conscience of Europe which had 
 authority over all European nations, to deny that 
 treaties and contracts were binding on any power 
 that felt strong enough to break them, to deny 
 the rights of nationality, to deny honour, to deny 
 reciprocity of obligation between States and in- 
 dividuals, — ^in a word, to deny all those princi- 
 ples upon which the comity of Europe is 
 founded; and when she proposed to back these 
 denials with an immense armament created for 
 the purpose, the most honourable and courageous 
 thing for the European nations to have done 
 would have been to have attacked her in defence 
 of the institutions she insulted and threatened. 
 They did not do this for reasons which I have 
 attempted partly to analyse in this book. They 
 preferred a less heroic policy, which was never- 
 theless the only policy that, after refusing to 
 challenge instant battle, they could adopt — the 
 policy of imitation. 
 
 All nations have always had armies of some 
 kind to defend themselves against their neigh- 
 bours, and support such claims as those neigh- 
 bours might challenge. There is nothing ab- 
 normal in that; if it is an imperfection, it is an 
 imperfection incidental to the organisation of 
 
192 The Prussian Hath Said in His Heart 
 
 men in nations, and can only be destroyed by 
 destroying nations, — an idea as unthinkable as 
 it is odious. But there is something abnormal 
 in the frantic piling up of armaments, the wild 
 race to secure more men and more guns, which 
 has gone on with ever-increasing speed for the 
 last forty years. And that abnormality was the 
 direct result of the presence in Europe of a 
 Power which challenged the common morals of 
 the comity of nations, armed in support of that 
 challenge, yet which the other nations would not 
 fight. From that unnatural condition pro- 
 ceeded a disease from which it is not unreason- 
 able to hope that this war will relieve us. 
 
 Prussia had to arm because it was her theory 
 that armed force was the only thing that counted, 
 and because it was on the strength of her su- 
 premacy in arms that she challenged the con- 
 science of the world. The other nations, since 
 they did not choose to fight Prussia, had to arm 
 because, if they did not do so, they knew that 
 Prussia would instantly attack them. Hence 
 Conscription answered Conscription and Dread- 
 nought answered Dreadnought, and the whole 
 energies of Europe were directed to a single end 
 — the creation of mightier and more costly en- 
 gines of destruction. 
 
After The War 193 
 
 I say that this was unnatural and therefore 
 bad. Armies are not unnatural. Wars are not 
 unnatural. But it is unnatural that nations 
 should be in a continual state of feverish prepa- 
 ration for a war that is continually delayed. 
 Normally a nation ought to be either fighting or 
 living at peace. A reasonable readiness for war 
 ought, of course, to be common to all nations. 
 But the Armed Peace, as it existed before the 
 outbreak of this war, was, as I have said, an ab- 
 normal condition, which could never have come 
 into being or been maintained but for the pres- 
 ence of something unwholesome in the constitu- 
 tion of Europe — the unwholesome thing being, 
 of course, the military power of the great Atheist 
 State.i 
 
 I need hardly explain that I do not mean that 
 the nations of Europe should have refused to 
 
 1 Much the same applies to the elaborate system of espionage 
 which Prussia initiated and forced upon the whole of Europe. 
 Of course all nations have always used spies in time of war; 
 and, though the spy, if caught, was very properly shot, no dis- 
 grace attached to the practice. But the organisation of an 
 elaborate system of espionage in friendly countries in time of 
 peace is one of Prussia's contributions to the decadence of 
 European morals. Other nations have been forced to follow her 
 example, though none of them have gone to the same lengths. 
 The system of promiscuous payment for all information re- 
 ceived, which makes every German, naturalised or unnatural- 
 ised, resident in a foreign country a potential spy, is peculiar 
 to the Prussian Government. One may reasonably hope that 
 with the destruction of that Government it will cease to exist. 
 
194 The Prussian Hath Said in His Heart 
 
 take part in the competition whicli Prussia had 
 started and steadily maintained. That would 
 simply have been buttering themselves for Prus- 
 sia to eat. I think that the more manly and in 
 the long run more prudent course would have 
 been to have accepted the Prussian challenge and 
 fought when it was first offered. But, failing 
 that, there was nothing to do but for all of us to 
 be prepared for the issue which every sane man 
 could see must come. For my own part, I have 
 nothing to repent of in the matter : I always sup- 
 ported every proposal for the strengthening both 
 of our military and of our naval forces. But I 
 have sometimes thought that a word of repent- 
 ance is due from some of those who now profess 
 to recognise the indisputable fact of Prussian 
 aggression, but who a very little while ago were 
 not only denouncing and ridiculing as "scare- 
 mongers" every one who drew attention to it, but 
 in some cases (notably in their attacks on Mr. 
 Blatchford, who deserves at this moment more 
 credit for foresight than any living Englishman) 
 accompanied their abuse and their sneers by the 
 foulest innuendoes. 
 
 So long as Prussia existed, preparation for 
 war was the first duty of every patriot through- 
 out Europe. But if this war ends, as we must 
 
After The War 195 
 
 see that it (Joes end, in the utter destruction of 
 Prussian military power, one may fairly expect 
 that the extravagant expenditure on huge arma- 
 ments may be gradually reduced to what men of 
 other and healthier ages have considered as nor- 
 mal. The sanctity of treaties will have been vin- 
 dicated. The power of Europe to defend its 
 traditions by arms against any who dispute 
 them will have been established. There will be 
 a recognised code of international morals to 
 which men and nations can appeal. And if any 
 Power should in the future be tempted to follow 
 the example of Prussia and defy that code, I 
 think that, after the lesson they have had, the 
 nations of Europe will hardly again wait more 
 than a hundred and fifty years before vindicating 
 it by the sword. 
 
 This war will not end war. I know of only 
 two ways of ending war. One is by endowing 
 all men with perfect wisdom and unfailing vir- 
 tue ; the other is by depriving them of their man- 
 hood. The first is not within our power, and the 
 chances of the second are happily disappearing 
 with the prospects of a Prussian victory. There 
 will be plenty of more wars, no doubt; perhaps 
 more than ever when the evil fear which under- 
 lay the Armed Peace is lifted from the heart of 
 
196 The Prussian Hath Said in His Heart 
 
 Europe. But it is fair enough to hope that these 
 wars will be conducted under strict rules of hon- 
 our, and that such things as the mere theft of 
 territory from a weaker by a stronger State, as 
 well as such military methods as have been em- 
 ployed in Belgium, will be forbidden by that 
 common conscience of Christendom which our 
 arms are now vindicating. 
 
 There remain to be considered the indirect re- 
 sults of a Prussian overthrow, and these, though 
 no man foresee them exactly, cannot fail to be of 
 great moment. 
 
 First among them I should place the discredit 
 and disfavour which must more or less overtake 
 all those experiments in imitation of the Prus- 
 sian system which have been popular in so many 
 nations of late years. For instance, when the 
 Chancellor of the Exchequer introduced his cele- 
 brated Insurance Act, it came quite natural to 
 him to say that his system had been adopted in 
 Prussia; it was taken as a guarantee of wisdom 
 and efficiency. Such a method of recommenda- 
 tion would hardly be so popular to-day. I have 
 said in a previous chapter that the permanent 
 impression left by the victories of 1870 was the 
 conviction that it strengthened a state to treat 
 the bulk of citizens as slaves. The fall of Prus- 
 
After The War 197 
 
 sia can hardly fail to produce a reaction in fa- 
 vour of freedom, and that reaction will be 
 strengthened by the knowledge of the informed 
 that more than one Prussian failure has been 
 really due to the superiority of troops not sub- 
 jected to the Prussian sort of terrorism. The 
 servile theory of society towards which so much 
 of Europe, and England in particular, has re- 
 cently been tending will receive a setback; and 
 there will be a corresponding revival of the belief 
 that the best military valour is to be found 
 among freemen who feel that they have leaders 
 but no masters. 
 
 For the same reason I should not expect the 
 democratic reaction of which I have spoken to 
 take the CoUectivist form. That form is almost 
 as essentially Prussian as the tyranny ag3,inst 
 which it appears as a reaction. As a speculation 
 it has no doubt often figured in the thought of 
 Europe, but it was in North Germany that the 
 movement of working-class discontent was first 
 canalized in the direction of a demand for uni- 
 versal State ownership. In point of fact German 
 Social Democracy is based upon the same prin- 
 ciples as Prussian Imperialism. It accepts the 
 same materialist basis; it founds its claim not, 
 as the earlier French Socialists did, on an ab- 
 
198 The Prussian Hath Said in His Heart 
 
 stract theory of justice, but on a calculation of 
 the material interests concerned, and on a 
 supposed "necessity" produced by "economic 
 forces." The Prussian Socialist, like the Prus- 
 sian Imperialist, thinks of machines as control- 
 ling men, not as controlled by them. Like him, 
 he regards his victory as "inevitable." Like 
 him, he is indifferent to freedom, and thinks in 
 terms not of the man, or of the family, but of the 
 State. 
 
 Finally, like his masters, he is beautifully con- 
 scious of Ms own superiority to the rest of the 
 human race. I remember, in my Socialist days, 
 attending a meeting of the International Social- 
 ist Congress at Amsterdam, and listening to a 
 German Socialist who made a speech almost in- 
 distinguishable from one of the Kaiser's own. 
 It was all about German Culture and the Teu- 
 tonic Spirit leading the human race, only it was 
 going to lead it towards government by Prussian 
 Socialists instead of by Prussian Junkers. I 
 shall always remember that speech by reason of 
 a brilliant retort which it provoked from the late 
 Jean Jaur6s, whose subconscious Gallic patriot- 
 ism it succeeded in jarring into life. The Ger- 
 man had asked the world to look at the three 
 million Socialist voters of the German Empire. 
 
After The War 199 
 
 "Yes," said Jaur6s, "look at them ! WJien there 
 are three million Socialists in France, something 
 will happen!" It was profoundly true. But 
 Jaures never, perhaps, realised that the reason 
 why three million French Socialists would be 
 formidable is the same as the reason why they 
 do not exist. 
 
 If we leave aside our own excellent profes- 
 sional troops, freely enlisted and treated respect- 
 fully and as free men by their officers, a victory 
 of the Allies in this war, whether of French or 
 Eussians, Belgians or Serbians, is a victory of 
 free peasants, men who own their own land, in- 
 dependent alike of landlord and public official. 
 Such a victory, since success in war seems always 
 to have the effect which I have noted in the Prus- 
 sian case, is likely to increase the number of 
 those who look to such a regime of free land- 
 owning families as the working model of the 
 happy human society which we desire to see re- 
 placing the present unstable combination of 
 anarchy and oppression. 
 
 For the same reason I should expect to see 
 victory produce something like a reaction against 
 much that we are accustomed to call civilisation. 
 I have called the Prussians barbarians, and 
 gpwitually speaking it is profoundly true that 
 
200 The Prussian Hath Said in His Heart 
 
 the Kussian is a much more civilised man than 
 the North German. But there is another sense 
 in which the Prussians themselves use the word 
 when they accuse us of "allying ourselves with 
 Muscovite barbarism" against German Culture, 
 and in which many Englishmen have been in the 
 habit of usiug it; and, using it in that sense, 
 barbarism has done not a little to justify itself 
 of late. The splendid military qualities re- 
 vealed recently by the little Balkan nations and 
 well maintained by Serbia in this war will lead 
 many to ask whether the complexity of modern 
 elaborations of life really makes a nation 
 stronger (it is clear that it does not make it hap- 
 pier) than it was under simpler conditions. A 
 victory for Prussia would be a defeat for civilisa- 
 tion in the sense that it would mean a defeat for 
 all European ideas and for all that makes the 
 intercourse of free and varied nations possible; 
 but it would be a victory for civilisation — ^if 
 civilisation means Krupp. On the other hand, 
 the defeat of Prussia by Kussia would be victory 
 for the view that it fares ill with that land where 
 arms accumulate and men decay. It would be a 
 victory for Man over the work of his hands. 
 
 I have spoken of Serbia, and I am not sure 
 that before the war is over Serbia will not stand 
 
After The War 201 
 
 as high in men's honour as any of the Allies. 
 At present there is perceptible in my country a 
 curious and, to my mind, a somewhat ungracious 
 disposition to speak of Serbia as if she were in 
 some way not quite respectable. Even Mr. Lloyd 
 George, in defending Serbia, finds it necessary 
 to say that her record is "not unspotted." 
 (Neither is Mr. Lloyd George's, if it comes to 
 that ! ) But Serbia's record is very heroic, which 
 Mr. George's is not. All the Allies are fighting 
 against tyranny, but Serbia's whole history is one 
 long fight against tyranny. By the geographical 
 accident of her situation she has had in the pres- 
 ent war to fight her own battles far away from her 
 powerful allies, and she has fought it with splen- 
 did spirit, refusing to remain on the defensive, 
 and pushing whenever fortune favoured her, 
 raids into the territory of the mighty empire 
 which had sought to crush her. I am not sure 
 that when the war is over, Serbia may not become 
 a sort of exemplar for the many gallant little 
 nations which the overthrow of Prussia will lib- 
 erate and strengthen. 
 
 There is a mordant contrast between the con- 
 duct and fortunes of the two small nationalities 
 which have been involved in this war. Serbia 
 was the terror of diplomatists and a standing 
 
202 The Prussian Hath Said in His Heart 
 
 nuisance to all the Chancelleries of Europe. 
 Not only was she regrettably addicted to exhibit- 
 ing her power of self-defence, but she displayed 
 an even more perverse determination to liberate 
 by arms her fellow countrymen oppressed by an 
 alien yoke. By her unrepentant pugnacity she 
 kept all the statesmen in a continual fret over 
 the security of their "Armed Peace." In a word 
 she had thoroughly mastered the sound advice 
 which Byron gave to the oppressed nations of 
 Southeastern Europe : — 
 
 Trust not for freedom to the Franks, 
 They have a King that buys and sells ! 
 
 In native swords and native ranks 
 The only hope of courage dwells. 
 
 And the event has justified her. On the other 
 hand, Belgium put herself in the hands of 
 Europe, trusted for protection to the public faith 
 of Europe, was resolutely pacific and strictly ob- 
 served her neutrality. The result is that her 
 territory has been violated, her fields ravaged, 
 her cities burnt and sacked, her peaceful popu- 
 lation massacred or driven into exile! In her 
 agony she has indeed shown a valour which 
 shamed both the treacherous power that attacked 
 her and the timorous Europe that so long tol- 
 erated the existence of that power. She will as- 
 
After The War 203 
 
 suredly come out of the war, for all her terrible 
 losses, a more formidable state than she was 
 when she entered it, and, when she has won back 
 her soil and taken her share of vengeance on her 
 enemies, it would be surprising if she consented 
 to hold her own by permission of any one but her 
 heroic self. 
 
 And as I think this war will change our con- 
 ception of civilisation, so, I fancy, it will largely 
 change our conception of democracy. We shall 
 perhaps think of it less in terms of constitutional 
 mechanism, and more in terms of the popular will 
 and the actual response of the Government to it. 
 We shall be less disposed to think we are being 
 governed democratically because the man who, 
 on account of his wealth or family connections 
 or his known subservience, has been co-opted by 
 a group of self-elected politicians to be one of 
 their number, has to go through the farce of being 
 chosen as the less objectionable of the two candi- 
 dates submitted to the electors of Drabbleton- 
 on-Ouse. When we have seen how obviously 
 more democratic are the Russians under their 
 Tsar than are the Germans under their ruling 
 caste, we shall perhaps realise that democracy 
 does not depend on electoral machinery, but 
 that, on the contrai-y, the success of any ma- 
 
204 The Prussian Hath Said in His Heart 
 
 chinery, electoral or otherwise, depends on de- 
 mocracy. 
 
 Eussia is a permanent mystery to all the West, 
 and I, who know nothing of that mystery save 
 from hearsay and books, shall not attempt even 
 dimly to forecast her future. This only I will 
 say: that all the things that seem to have been 
 really evil in Russia, her bureaucratic corrup- 
 tion, her espionage, her persecution of subject 
 peoples, appear to have been Prussian exports 
 supported continually by Prussian influence; 
 while all the things that are evidently and splen- 
 didly good, her sense of fraternity, her intense 
 religion, her charity and her stout courage, are 
 native and spring from the soil. I am not sure 
 that the change from St. Petersburg to Petro- 
 grad was not more important than any constitu- 
 tional concession that the Tsar could have made. 
 Once Russia is purely Russian we may live to 
 see great changes, not perhaps in the direction 
 of mere Western Parliamentarism (which has 
 not been so conspicuous a success in its native 
 home as to make the desirability of imitating it 
 self-evident) but certainly in the direction of 
 greater understanding, greater responsibility and 
 more real representative relations between rulers 
 and people. 
 
After The War 205 
 
 In one respect at least the Eussification of Eus- 
 sia must almost certainly mean a victory for lib- 
 erty and human right. To one martyred nation, 
 bowed down under more than a hundred years of 
 persecution, the bugle-note of this war is the 
 trumpet of resurrection. The quotation from 
 Bismarck which I have already given in another 
 chapter shows that that astute intriguer saw that 
 the Panslavist movement was favourable to Pol- 
 ish liberty, and threw all his energies into the 
 work of oppressing Polish liberty for that rea- 
 son. But this war is the triumph of Panslavism, 
 and therefore the defeat of Poland's enemies 
 both within and without the Eussian Empire. 
 
 There is another reason why, apart from any 
 confidence in the Eussian promise, practically all 
 Poles feel this war as the end of their servitude. 
 Frederick the Great was wise in his generation. 
 The old Satanist knew his business when he in- 
 vited his neighbours to that vile sacrament of 
 murder. A divided Poland had the hopeless task 
 of fighting three great empires, if she would seek 
 her independence. A united Poland under a 
 Eussian hegemony would, if oppression were at- 
 tempted, have, at worst, only one enemy to op- 
 pose, and would enjoy the good wishes and per- 
 haps the active support of the other European 
 
206 The Prussian Hath Said in His Heart 
 
 Powers, as well as of a considerable body of opin- 
 ion in Russia itself. 
 
 There is another people to whom this war may 
 bring the renewal of nationality, a people that 
 has suffered a stranger destiny even than the 
 Poles and that has endured an even longer exile 
 from the rights of nationhood. I mean the Jews. 
 The resurrection of this nation is no less desir- 
 able in the interests of all European peoples than 
 in its own. In particular the three principal 
 Allies have suffered continually from the effects 
 of the dispersion of this alien element through- 
 out Europe. Whether they have persecuted the 
 Jews, or tolerated the Jews, or submitted 
 to the dictation of the Jews, they have equally 
 found the omnipresence of this people an in- 
 soluble problem. But now, since the folly or 
 treason of the atheist "Young Turks" has 
 thrown the Ottoman Empire into the melting 
 pot, an entirely unexpected opportunity arises 
 of solving that problem. The difficulty has 
 been that while the Jews could never be ab- 
 sorbed into the civilisation of any European 
 country, it was hardly consonant with justice to 
 treat them as foreigners, since there was no for- 
 eign nation to which they could be attached. 
 Now, however, their ancient country of Palestine 
 
After The War 207 
 
 is available, and there is no reason why an inde- 
 pendent Jewish State should not be established 
 there, though Christians would naturally prefer 
 that the Holy Places should be placed under in- 
 ternational control. It would not be reasonable 
 to expect that all Jews should return to Pales- 
 tine, but once the Jewish State existed with a 
 Palestinian Ambassador in every capital and 
 Palestinian Consuls in all the principal towns 
 supporting the interests of the dispersed Jews, 
 it would be easy to treat them, in every country 
 ELS an alien community with their proper priv- 
 ileges and their proper disqualifications. I 
 think that the Tsar, who is evidently anxious to 
 do all he can to make things tolerable for the 
 Jews, but who at the same time rightly refuses 
 to sacrifice his own people, might with especial 
 propriety lead the way in this matter. 
 
 In France also we may look for a great change ; 
 a change already observable some years before 
 the war, but one which the war can hardly fail 
 to hasten. It is hardly thinkable that after one 
 of those great spontaneous military efforts of 
 theirs, in which their real soul is best and most 
 fully expressed, the French will ever again feel 
 satisfied with the effete Parliamentarism that so 
 constantly misrepresents them. Not that I 
 
208 The Prussian Hath Said in His Heart 
 
 should anticipate that Eoyalism will gain by the 
 war : I should think that it would be almost an- 
 nihilated by it. For my own part, I have always 
 felt that if I were a Frenchman, I could not 
 possibly be a Koyalist, if only because a Eestora- 
 tion would really write "Defeat" across the 
 grandest of all the epics of French arms. 
 That feeling must be stronger than ever to-day, 
 for after all, however patriotic and courageous 
 the young enthusiasts of the Action francais 
 may have shown themselves, the fact must re- 
 main that it is to the strains of the Marseillaise 
 that the French soldier has charged the feroces 
 soldats who have violated his fatherland, and 
 that it is the Tricolour which he will at last 
 have the glory of planting on the citadels of 
 Metz and Strasburg. I should rather expect 
 that the French would recover, under the sym- 
 bols of the Eevolution, those things which have 
 continually proved consonant with their blood 
 and civilisation, the strong and popular central 
 executive, the constant direct consultation of the 
 people, and above all the deep conviction that 
 soldiers represent them better than politicians. 
 One thing at least we may confidently expect, 
 — a final end to the sectarian policy dictated to 
 the French Government by the Masonic Lodges. 
 
After The War 209 
 
 By one of those ironies of which all history is 
 full, a law originally passed by the Masons as 
 an insult to the Catholic Church has made such 
 stupidities impossible in the future. No French 
 Government is going to persecute priests who 
 have faced Prussian bullets. Nor is any French 
 Government likely to attempt to apply such 
 petty tyranny to the Catholic population of the 
 recovered provinces. 
 
 It will be interesting to see what effects the 
 obliteration of Prussia will have upon the Ger- 
 manies. 
 
 It may be that the little kingdoms and city 
 states which for so many hundred years formed 
 the political framework of the Germanies, and 
 within the confines of which so much splendid 
 art and music and literature was fostered, will 
 re-appear. Perhaps they will be joined in some 
 sort of loose league or in several such leagues. 
 Or again we may see a new Federal German 
 Empire. It is a matter for the Germans to de- 
 cide according to their tastes, and their tastes 
 not being in the main political, they are likely 
 enough to leave it to events to decide. The only 
 condition on which Europe has to insist is : that 
 Prussia should be entirely excluded from any 
 such arrangement. 
 
210 The Prussian Hath Said in His Heart 
 
 There is no reason, for imposing upon the 
 Hapshurgs the same veto which must certainly 
 be imposed on the Hohenzollerns. The Haps- 
 burgs must necessarily lose most of their Slav 
 provinces, and probably their Italian ones also, 
 but there is no reason why their German and 
 Magyar dominions should not remain to them. 
 Nay, if the Germans are looking for a titular 
 head for a new German Confederation they 
 might do worse than consider the suitability of 
 a Hapsburg primacy. Until they allowed them- 
 selves to be made the cat's-paws of Prussia the 
 Hapsburgs had shown no little skill and tact 
 in driving a varied team of kingdoms and par- 
 liaments, and might do so again. At any rate 
 the Catholic Kingdoms of South Germany, which 
 have never loved the Prussians, might easily find 
 themselves more comfortable and secure under 
 Austrian leadership. 
 
 Of course, Alsace and Lorraine must be an- 
 nexed to France and Posen will form part of a 
 united Poland, with the Tsar as its king. The 
 fate of Schleswig-Holstein raises a question of 
 peculiar interest to this country, for the Keil 
 Canal runs through these territories. Among 
 the many broken pledges of Prussia there is one 
 that possesses a certain interest, — a pledge to 
 
After The War 211 
 
 take a plebiscite of the Schleswigers and Hol- 
 steiners as to their future. There is no reason 
 why that plebiscite should not now be taken, or 
 why any parts of those provinces that desired 
 reunion with Denmark should not have their 
 will. Our own interests clearly demand that in 
 any case either the Keil Canal must (its for- 
 tresses being dismantled) be placed wholly on 
 the hands of a power too small to be dangerous, 
 or it must be destroyed. That, with the de- 
 struction or surrender of the German Fleet and 
 the recession of Heligoland, with such indem- 
 nity as we may be able to enforce and such col- 
 onies as we may choose to take, should be the 
 English share in the fruits of victory. 
 
 As to the indirect effect of the war on England 
 I wish I could think that to us also it would 
 bring really democratic government; but I 
 rather doubt if it will have that effect. I think 
 that a serious disaster would probably have suc- 
 ceeded in waking Englishmen up to the need of 
 controlling their irresponsible rulers. But we 
 have been spared disaster so far, and it is hardly 
 likely that it will now overtake us. Our govern- 
 ing class has had good luck, and has, on the 
 whole, done better than we might have expected. 
 It will be rather absurd, no doubt, after a great 
 
212 The Prussian Hath Said in His Heart 
 
 national effort to go back to the ludicrous sham- 
 fighting of the politicians, but I should not be 
 candid if I said that I thought such foolishness 
 impossible. 
 
 Two good things I should expect for England 
 as a result of this war. One is an increasing 
 resistance to the sort of oppressive legislation 
 which our politicians have borrowed from Prus- 
 sia, — some particularly bad examples of which 
 have appeared since the war broke out. The 
 other is a certain insistence that the English 
 governing class, if it is to govern, shall at least 
 be English. 
 
 The problem has long been a serious one, but 
 it has never before been brought home to the 
 British public as it has been brought home of 
 late. We have seen how our national action has 
 been embarrassed, both before and since the out- 
 break of war, by the presence in positions of great 
 political influence of men who were not of our 
 blood and could not be expected to share our 
 national feeling. But that brings up the whole 
 question of government by secret payments, to 
 which some of us have been trying to direct 
 public attention for years. If you give political 
 power in return for a secret subscription to the 
 
After The War 213 
 
 Party Funds, you necessarily give that power 
 not only to the English plutocrat, but to the 
 foreigner and perhaps to the traitor. Mr. Car- 
 negie is reputed to be a subscriber to these 
 funds. He is an American. I know of no rea- 
 son why the Kaiser himself should not have sub- 
 scribed. The Prime Minister tells us that he 
 knows nothing about these subscriptions, and 
 the Chief Whip, who alone apparently does know 
 about them, might, for all I know, regard a for- 
 eign sovereign as an excellent catch. I admit 
 that I do not think it very probable that the 
 Kaiser contributed, but it is virtually certain 
 that many Germans contributed, and we cannot 
 tell how far the influence they acquired by so 
 doing may have influenced our policy up to the 
 very point at which such influence would become 
 positive treason. It is certain, as I have said, 
 that, up to the moment of war, all the forces of 
 cosmopolitan finance were ranged on the side of 
 a dishonourable peaca 
 
 The strcmg resentment now felt against the 
 presence of alien enemies in high places can 
 hardly fail to force the people of this country 
 to pay to these evils more attention than they 
 have paid in the past, and to insist that, if we 
 
214 The Prussian Hath Said in His Heart 
 
 are still to be governed by an oligarchy, it shall 
 at least be a native oligarchy and not a foreign 
 one. 
 
 On the whole, I think the truest thing to be said 
 about the consequences of this war is that which 
 has already been said by a friend, Mr. Arthur 
 Ransome, — that it will tend to make the nations 
 which have taken part in it increasingly na- 
 tional. It will bring them nearer together in 
 matters of contract and honour, because it will 
 re-establish the common code which Prussia 
 denied, and which other countries had half for- 
 gotten. But it will take them farther apart in 
 matters of social custom and predilection, be- 
 cause each will have had in the course of its fight 
 for existence to dig down to its own roots and 
 rediscover its origins. 
 
 There used to be a thing called "Internation- 
 alism." When I was a Socialist it was supposed 
 (I never could imagine why) to be a part of 
 Socialism. What it meant 1 never really dis- 
 covered. It might, of course, mean something 
 perfectly reasonable and even indisputable. 
 Thus it might mean that what happened in one 
 nation affected other nations. That is true; 
 but instead of being a reason for expecting uni- 
 versal peace, it is obviously a reason for being 
 
After The War 215 
 
 prepared for, and, if necessary, waging wars. 
 Again it might mean that nations have reciprocal 
 rights and duties. That also is true, and it is a 
 reason, and a good reason, why each nation 
 should be ready to perform its duties ; but it is 
 also a good reason why each nation should be 
 ready to defend its rights. It is also true that 
 these are human sanctities common to all na- 
 tions, such as alone render their intercourse pos- 
 sible: but it should be added that one of these 
 universal sanctities is the right of a nation to 
 fight. 
 
 What "Internationalism" seemed to mean in 
 the mouths of most of its advocates was that a 
 man's temporal loyalty was due, not to the sov- 
 ereign society of which he was a member, but to 
 an abstraction called "The Human Eace." This 
 entity must not be confused with the old and 
 sound religious conception of your "duty to- 
 wards your neighbour" — ^towards any individual 
 man simply because he is a man. For that duty 
 is defined and reciprocal, while one's duty to- 
 wards "Humanity" was supposed to be one of 
 unconditional loyalty, overriding even the plain 
 duty, based on reciprocity, which a man owes to 
 the society to which he belongs. What this 
 strange doctrine had to do with the Socialist doc- 
 
216 The Prussian Hath Said in His Heart 
 
 trine which I once held, that the means of pro- 
 duction ought to be controlled by the political 
 officers of the State, I never could understand. 
 As to what it is supposed to have to do with the 
 doctrine which I still hold, that sovereignty in 
 any State belongs of right to the people of that 
 State, I am even more in the dark. But it is 
 certain that for many years both Socialism and 
 Democracy were mysteriously associated in 
 men's minds with "Internationalism." 
 
 It is my hope that that association will not 
 survive this war. 
 
 The war did not come unexpectedly — except 
 perhaps at the actual moment of its outbreak. Its 
 coming had been foreseen for years, and no one 
 had talked about it more than the International 
 Socialists. They had had years in which to pre- 
 pare for the crisis which they all told us they 
 foresaw. If they had tried to hold the "prole- 
 tarians of all lands" from fighting, and had 
 failed, it might have been said that the war came 
 too soon for them, and that a little more "educa- 
 tion of the democracy" would have done the trick. 
 But as they themselves, who were presumably as 
 thoroughly "educated" as men could be, were 
 just as eager to offer their services to their re- 
 
After The War 217 
 
 spective national governments as were their sup- 
 porters, we can only presume that their whole 
 theory was based on an illusion. 
 
 It is, of course, true that the French and Bel- 
 gian Socialists could legitimately plead that their 
 nations were fighting in self-defence, while the 
 German Socialists could plead that it was always 
 pretty obvious that they never had done and 
 really never contemplated doing anything 
 against their Government. But I am not so 
 much concerned with possible debating excuses 
 as with the facts. When Gustav Herv6 said that 
 his loyalty was to some imaginary International 
 Proletariat and not to France, I have not the 
 shadow of a doubt that what he said was per- 
 fectly sincere. But would he now be prepared 
 to say that it was true? When the crisis came, 
 did he not discover that after all his loyalty was 
 to France and to nothing else: that it was just 
 because he was a Frenchman that the oppression 
 of the French poor had moved him to anger; and 
 that it was just the same motive that made him 
 ask the Government to send him to the front? 
 
 I invite those who feel with me that the lib- 
 eration of the poor from the insupportable con- 
 ditions of our time is the cause best worth fight- 
 
218 The Prussian Hath Said in His Heart 
 
 ing for, and that the only means to this end is 
 Democracy — that is, government by the general 
 will — to consider these things. 
 
 I really find it impossible to believe that they 
 can again assemble in "International Socialist 
 Congresses," and pretend that what has happened 
 has not happened, and that this astounding reve- 
 lation of what it is that we really love and rev- 
 erence, and feel to be worthy of the devotion of 
 our lives, has not come upon us. Either they 
 must be discouraged and feel disposed to aban- 
 don the struggle, or they must look for a new 
 basis on which to act. 
 
 I invite them to take the latter course. I 
 invite them to ask themselves whether there ever 
 really was any connection between their cham- 
 pionship of the poor and the denial of nationality, 
 except the fact that their economic theory (with 
 the soundness or unsoundness of which I am not 
 here concerned) was invented by a Jew, who nat- 
 urally saw no difference between Europeans, 
 just as we see no difference between Chinamen. 
 
 I ask them, on the other hand, to consider 
 whether there is not a close and legitimate con- 
 nection between the doctrine that the popular 
 will ought to be sovereign in each State and the 
 allegiance which men owe to such a State. I 
 
After The War 219 
 
 would remind them that during the French Eevo- 
 lution a "patriot" meant especially a Eevolution- 
 ist and a champion of popular rights. 
 
 Let them, therefore, go on championing the 
 rights of the poor against the rich, of the popu- 
 lace against the governing class; but let them 
 do so each for his own people, and on a basis of 
 Nationalism. Then, perhaps, they will find that 
 the populace will listen as it has never listened 
 heretofore. 
 
 As to myself, I never did believe in "The In- 
 ternational," even when I was a Socialist and 
 continually heard the words repeated as a sort 
 of solemn incantation; and I am not likely to 
 accept it now that its professions have faded at 
 the first touch of reality. 
 
 THE END