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 UNIVERSITY 
 
 LIBRARY 
 
 GIFT OF 
 Nixon Griffis 
 
Cornell University Library 
 D 523.C52 
 
 Prussian hath said in his heart 
 
 3 1924 027 856 339 
 
a Cornell University 
 y Library 
 
 The original of tliis book is in 
 tine Cornell University Library. 
 
 There are no known copyright restrictions in 
 the United States on the use of the text. 
 
 http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924027856339 
 
THE PRUSSIAN 
 HATH SAID IN HIS HEART- 
 
THE PRUSSIAN HATH 
 SAID IN HIS HEART- 
 
 BY 
 
 CECIL CHESTERTON 
 
 LONDON 
 
 CHAPMAN AND HALL, Ltd. 
 
 1914 
 
913284 
 
 Pkintkd in Great Britaim by 
 
 Richard Clay & Sons, Limited, 
 
 brunswick st., stamford st., s.e., 
 
 and bunoay, suffolk, 
 
TO 
 MY BROTHER 
 
 GILBERT KEITH CHESTERTON 
 
 IN MEMORY OF 
 
 MANY ARGUMENTS 
 
 AND AN 
 
 ALLIANCE 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 INTRODUCTION . 
 
 I THE GREAT DIABOUST . 
 
 II THE WARS OF ANTI-CHRIST . 
 
 III THE WORSHIP OF THE BEAST 
 
 IV THE NEMESIS 
 
 V 1914 .... 
 
 VI THE BARBARIANS. 
 
 VII "thou SHALT NOT SUFFER A WITCH TO LIVE 
 
 VIII AFTER THE WAR ..... 
 
 PAGB 
 
 I 
 
 9 
 
 31 
 
 65 
 
 97 
 
 "5 
 
 165 
 
 184 
 
 208 
 
THE PRUSSIAN HATH SAID 
 IN HIS HEART- 
 INTRODUCTION 
 
 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 shpw that war in a 
 certain perspective, 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 
 bf the German Empire. Prussia as it existed 
 before the war, was incompatible with a civil- 
 ized and Christian Europe. Sooner or later 
 the one had to be crushed, if the other were 
 
2 THE PRUSSIAN 
 
 not to be destroyed or (what would be worse) 
 corrupted. That is my thesis. 
 
 To that thesis there is a very practical 
 corollary; 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 
 historical it might be well to suspend its demon- 
 stration 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 theoretic : 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 Germanic Empires may bring the 
 question of the settlement which is to follow 
 into the immediate sphere of discussion. In 
 another 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 night- 
 
HATH SAID IN HIS HEART— 3 
 
 mare 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. 
 
 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 in- 
 habiting 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 supnremacy of Prussia, and would ulti- 
 mately suffer 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 wickedness or madness of an individual 
 man or even of a group of men. Projects for 
 sending the present German Emperor to 
 
4 THE PRUSSIAN 
 
 St. Helena on the strength of a ludicrous com- 
 parison 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 picture 
 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 
 prevalence 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 criminals 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 
 
HATH SAID IN HIS HEART— 5 
 
 spirit and that creed have always directed the 
 policy of, Prussia. They now direct the policy 
 of Germany. In so far as the Emperor repre- 
 sents them, we are at war with the Emperor. 
 In so far as the governing class of Prussia 
 represents them, we are at war with the govern- 
 ing 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 
 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 some- 
 times spoken of as "Militarism"; that word 
 is not only inadequate but has been so mis- 
 used in the past, being continually applied to 
 that reverence for arms which is part of the 
 very stuff of Christendom, and again to those 
 reasonable precautions which a free nation will 
 always take to protect its interests and its 
 
6 THE PRUSSIAN 
 
 honour that it can only mislead. 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 system. 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 difficulties which they do not feel 
 able to solve. Some of these call themselves 
 Atheists. 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 distinction between right and 
 wrong, of a purely ethical (that is mystical) test 
 to which all human action must be brought. 
 Huxley did so when he said that iL-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 
 
HATH SAID IN HIS HEART— 7 
 
 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 appealing to God ; for Justice and 
 Mercy are attributes of God, and their claim 
 to unchallengeable authority 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 jus- 
 tice, he is really admitting justice to be super- 
 human and implying a superhuman Judge. 
 
 The real Atheist is a man without God; not 
 a man who cannot satisfy himself as to the 
 intellectual proposition that there is a God, but 
 a man for whom God does not exist, for whom 
 there is no Righteous Judge of Creation whose 
 judgments are consciously or unconsciously 
 accepted; for whom the only tests of human 
 action is material success. Such a man may 
 not profess Atheism. He may even personify 
 the material 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 extraordinary speeches are quite ex- 
 plicable when so interpreted. It is certainly 
 
8 THE PRUSSIAN HATH SAID— 
 
 what is done by those Prussian theologians who 
 still cling to a profession of Theism and even 
 of what they call " Christianity," but whose 
 Pantheism is simply the Materialism of Pro- 
 fessor 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 
 remembered, 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. 
 
 " I myself have seen the ungodly in great 
 power : and flourishing like a green bay tree. 
 I went by, and lo, he was gone : I sought him, 
 but his place could nowhere be found." 
 
CHAPTER I 
 
 THE GREAT DIABOLIST 
 
 The difference between Prussia and the 
 other great nations of Europe can best be 
 understood if we consider her as the master- 
 piece 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 loves to destroy. They are the 
 creation of ages, and every age has left its mark 
 upon their structure. As in such a cathedral 
 you will find Renaissance work superimposed 
 on the Gothic, and behind that the Norman or 
 Romanesque, and perhaps in the foundations 
 the Roman brick, so into the making of Eng- 
 land or of France have entered the Roman 
 order and arms, and the gigantic miracle of the 
 Faith, and the energy of the Crusades, and the 
 high civilization of the Middle Ages, and 
 the rediscovery of Antiquity, and the religious 
 wars of Catholic and Protestant, and the 
 
 9 
 
10 THE PRUSSIAN 
 
 Revolution, and the new flame of intense 
 Nationality, which it kindled in friends and 
 foes. And besides their common inheritance 
 there has gone to the making of each the 
 special work of many great men, remembered 
 still or long forgotten, warriors, saints, law- 
 givers, 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 accom- 
 plished that she is to-day. She has added 
 much to her territory, much to her wealth, much 
 to her military 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 impress 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 
 
HATH SAID IN HIS HEART— 11 
 
 madness, and perhaps he bequeathed to his son 
 an insane taint which, indeed, broke out more 
 than once in the Hohenzollern dynasty. Any- 
 how, it is fair to the son to remember that, 
 apart from any question of heredity, his educa- 
 tion was calculated to give his temperament a 
 horrible twist. His father entertained for him 
 a hatred which, like all the old lunatic's pas- 
 sions, 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 unspeakable misery able, ener- 
 getic, 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 charac- 
 ter unfolded this unsoundness developed into 
 something more horrible than his father's wild- 
 est dementia. He seemed to hunger and thirst 
 after iniquity as saints hunger 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 
 
12 THE PRUSSIAN 
 
 history. There has been a tendency of late, 
 especially in Germany, to set up Napoleon as 
 a " Superman," or, as we should say, " Satan- 
 ist." But in truth such mystical devilries were 
 altogether alien to the lucid Latin brain and, in 
 the main, decent human instincts of the great 
 soldier of the Revolution. Doubtful or in- 
 different, 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 his remorse for it or 
 made excuses for it, and his excuses (as in the 
 case of the Due d'Enghein) had no reference 
 to any " Master Morality," but were the excuses 
 that men of dinarily 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 
 reluctantly as did the other two parties to the 
 
HATH SAID IN HIS HEART— 13 
 
 crime, but with joy in his heart and hideous 
 jests on his lips. "The Powers," he said, 
 "might now communicate and partake of the 
 Eucharistic Body of Poland." Nor does any- 
 thing in the transaction appear to have pleased 
 him more than the knowledge that he was 
 forcing a good woman to act against her con- 
 science. " I wonder," he said (and you can 
 hear the horrible chuckle), "how that old 
 woman has settled matters with her confes- 
 sor ? " 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 
 department 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 
 perversion. 
 
 In the Ages of Faith a simple explanation 
 of Frederick's character and career would prob- 
 
14 THE PRUSSIAN 
 
 ably 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 put- 
 ting it would have been as lucid and satisfac- 
 tory 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 
 sale of the soul, and such worldly success as 
 Frederick undoubtedly achieved was generally 
 considered as its typical reward. But the age 
 in which Frederick was born 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 in 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 honour- 
 able motives, by the great French philosophers 
 was producing deadly effect. Frederick, whose 
 early teachers and companions were French- 
 
HATH SAID IN HIS HEART— 15 
 
 men, who read, wrote, spoke and thought in 
 French — though in bad French — immediately 
 came under its influence. He was soon the 
 friend and correspondent 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 chief part of their campaign against the 
 Church. 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 imita- 
 tion of his favourite 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 twentieth 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 
 
16 THE PRUSSIAN 
 
 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 
 Denial of Right? 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 author- 
 ity. Every Government, whether its form be 
 democratic, oligarchic or despotic, claims the 
 obedience of its subjects on the ground that it 
 represents Justice, 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 
 
HATH SAID IN HIS HEART— 17 
 
 all Divine and human rights to obtain such 
 obedience ? 
 
 It is obvious enough that a government 
 .which cannot claim to repose on Right without 
 denying 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 
 ventured 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 obtain the force necessary to coerce 
 his subjects into obedience, since he himself 
 cannot be physically stronger than all of them 
 together ? 
 
 Frederick found the answer in that great 
 instrument which his father had in part created 
 — ^rather as a mad hobby than for any definite 
 purpose — but which his own genius made the 
 thing it ultimately became, and on which the 
 whole fabric of Prussian rule still rests — the 
 Prussian array. 
 
 Frederick knew that a body of men armed, 
 equipped and well disciplined can keep down 
 a much larger body of unarmed and undisci- 
 
18 THE PRUSSIAN 
 
 plined populace, especially if that populace is 
 not very courageous, lacks initiative and the 
 power of voluntary self-organization, and has 
 no strong and vivid tradition of freedom. For 
 the maintenance of obedience in the army itself 
 — at that time a professional or mercenary force 
 drawn from the poorest part of the population 
 — he relied upon Terror. The cruelty of the 
 punishments inflicted on his soldiers was un- 
 exampled even in the eighteenth century, when 
 all military discipline was at its harshest. Sen- 
 tences of many hundred lashes were freely 
 given, and a military flogging was so horrible 
 a business that soldiers sentenced to undergo it 
 constantly pleaded with evident sincerity to be 
 shot instead. When Frederick was the ally of 
 England he could not venture to allow Eng- 
 lishmen who were anxious to accompany his 
 army to do so, lest they should see by what 
 means Prussian discipline was maintained. In 
 fact, the whole aim of that discipline was, as 
 it is to-day, to make the soldier more frightened 
 of his officer 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 
 
HATH SAID IN HIS HEART— 19 
 
 deserves 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 ner- 
 vous and sometimes 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 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 col- 
 lapse, as it nearly did collapse nine or ten 
 years ago, when confidence in the Autocracy 
 had been for the moment shaken. But Frede- 
 rick's rule did not rest on opinion or consent; 
 
20 THE PRUSSIAN 
 
 it rested on his command of the army and the 
 army's command of the nation. So long as that 
 comniand was unshaken 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 Hohenzollerns 
 have departed from it they have done so to 
 their own disadvantage. Only yesterday 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. 
 
 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 
 according to their wisdom, by all his successors. 
 Of the precise character of the Prussian " social 
 legislation" which since 1870 Europe has so 
 largely imitated I shall have to speak hereafter. 
 
HATH SAID IN HIS HEART— 21 
 
 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 curious historical parallel. Ih one 
 other very remote 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 toasted of having elimi- 
 nated economic distress. It may seem wild to 
 draw an analogy between a king whose prin- 
 cipal vanity was in his emancipation from all 
 the superstitions of religion 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 Hohenzollern and Brigham Young. 
 
 Such was the State which Frederick pro- 
 posed to create, and when he had created it he 
 was resolved 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 weak- 
 
22 THE PRUSSIAN 
 
 ness, 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 distinct 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 vic- 
 tims. There is no doubt that up to a point 
 he was right. In this present war, for instance, 
 the Prussians would never have taken Liege 
 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 with- 
 out scruple or shame. The " scrap of paper " 
 argument is not original : it dates, like every- 
 thing else Prussian, from the great Frederick; 
 he also called treaties "pretty filigree work." 
 
 Such were the broad outlines of Frederick's 
 policy. Before we describe how far it suc- 
 ceeded 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 
 
HATH SAID IN HIS HEART— 23 
 
 could not possibly have been established in a 
 country with a vivid memory of the Roman 
 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 matters Frederick was fortunate. No 
 Roman legionary had ever been within many 
 hundred miles of the farthest outpost 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 popu- 
 lation was of mongrel Slavonic stock origin- 
 ally ruled by a small German aristocracy. The 
 Faith reached Prussia far later than it reached 
 Russia or Norway, and never penetrated deep. 
 Chaucer, writing at the end of the fourteenth 
 century, speaks of his knight as having fought 
 " against the heathen in Prussie." Early in the 
 sixteenth century the work, such as it was, was 
 ruined. The Prussians, at the command of 
 their princes, became Protestant in the lump 
 without any of those fierce religious disputes 
 and appeals to arms 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 
 
24 THE PRUSSIAN 
 
 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 religion had ended long before; in- 
 deed, 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 advan- 
 tage 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 
 Hohenzollern, king, philosopher and pervert, 
 threw down his challenge to God. 
 
HATH SAID IN HIS HEART— 25 
 
 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 guaranteed had been assented to by every 
 European sovereign, and by none in clearer 
 terms than by Frederick of Prussia. Neverthe- 
 less Frederick determined to strike a blow at 
 the Empress, and to strike it treacherously. 
 Without a declaration of war, without the 
 smallest intimation of his intentions, nay, in 
 the midst of renewed assurances of support, 
 he invaded Silesia. 
 
 The thing was, of course, simply theft. The 
 HohenzoUerns 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 
 expressly and recently confirmed the renuncia- 
 tion. 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 
 
26 THE PRUSSIAN 
 
 of English — or rather Scotch — men of letters. 
 I quote both from Carlyle's Life. Let us hear 
 Frederick first — 
 
 " This Silesia project fulfilled all his [the 
 King's] political views. It was a means of 
 acquiring reputation; of increasing the power 
 of the State; and of terminating what con- 
 cerned that long-litigated question 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, Trea- 
 sury empty. War Apparatus broken in pieces, 
 inexperienced young Princess to defend a dis- 
 puted succession of 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 
 
HATH SAID IN HIS HEART— 27 
 
 startlingly 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 
 to be believed on his word ( !) ; but it is cursorily, 
 and in the business way only — a man, you 
 would say, considerably 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 he had 
 
28 THE PRUSSIAN 
 
 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 Austria without provocation, and in 
 the following year he again abandoned his 
 allies without shame. His successive treach- 
 eries prospered exceedingly. When at last 
 peace was signed at Aix-la-Chapelle he was 
 the only gainer. He obtained Silesia and an 
 immense increase in the military prestige of 
 his kingdom. It can hardly be said that any 
 other Power 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 
 forgotten, 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 
 
HATH SAID IN HIS HEART— 29 
 
 Lepanto and along the Danube. For it was 
 a coalition whose object, though but half con- 
 scious, 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 
 genius 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 owned his rule than did any other army of 
 that age — ^was another. But the most funda- 
 mental reason was, perhaps, that Europe, 
 though angered and outraged by his insolent 
 and successful treason, was not, as it had once 
 been, one in spirit and tradition. It had no 
 one solid certainty to which to rally. Its rulers, 
 long accustomed to wage merely dynastic wars, 
 were undecided, and their motives were mixed. 
 England, somewhat isolated from Europe and 
 ruled since the Revolution by a close and very 
 national oligarchy, was ready to become Fred- 
 erick's ally that she might aid in depressing 
 the House of Bourbon. The throne of France 
 
30 THE PRUSSIAN HATH SAID— 
 
 was occupied by a man who was, indeed, by 
 no means the utterly 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 contemplation of the irre- 
 parable decline of his house and what might 
 well appear to him the decline of his country. 
 The Empress of Russia 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 be, 
 was there something of the real spirit and creed 
 of Don John of Austria or Richard Coeur de 
 Lion. 
 
 Anyhow, as the seven years of war ap- 
 proached their end, ally after ally slackened 
 and fell off from the confederacy. When peace 
 came Frederick still held Silesia. Injustice, 
 flagrant and unashamed, was confirmed. Athe- 
 ism, young, vigorous, accoutred, confident in its 
 material strength and in its negative certitudes, 
 had challenged a hesitating, an unprepared, a 
 doubtful Christendom to arms. And Atheism 
 had won. 
 
CHAPTER II 
 
 THE WARS OF ANTI-CHRIST 
 
 The remaining twenty years of Frederick's 
 life were years of ail 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 con- 
 ciliate 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 unswerv- 
 ingly down to the dismissal of Bismarck, and 
 
 was never really abandoned until within a year 
 
 31 
 
32 THE PRUSSIAN 
 
 or so of the present date. That power was 
 Russia. 
 
 It wa? Frederick's desire to connect himself 
 closely with Russia. 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 Fred- 
 erick, with a characteristic sort of pleasantry, 
 had 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. Russia was a more or less 
 willing and Austria a most reluctant accom- 
 plice ; 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 his descendants. The hatred 
 borne by the Poles to their conquerors — but 
 especially to the most guilty of their con- 
 querors, the Prussians — has been fruitful of evil 
 to his House, and it may be that even now it 
 is Poland that the Hohenzollern dynasty will 
 find its grave. 
 
 In 1786 Frederick died (God help him!) 
 
HATH SAID IN HIS HEART— 33 
 
 and went to his account. 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 we ask not, he at 
 least will never, through unending 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 
 attention. 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 
 
34 THE PRUSSIAN 
 
 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 peasantry. And 
 so with foreign enemies of the Republic. A 
 chivalrous compassion for a fallen family 
 played its part. To many, too, the dethrone- 
 ment of the Bourbons seemed a simple denial 
 of established right, the beginning of mere 
 anarchy. And, later, as the struggle devel- 
 oped, 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 people, among the Ger- 
 mans. 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 
 
HATH SAID IN HIS HEART^ 35 
 
 than in the hunger for freedom which inspired 
 the Revolution itself, had Prussia any share. 
 In all these g^eat storms in which the souls of 
 nations 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 was her adhesion to the Declaration of 
 Pillnitz in August 1791. By that declaration 
 the rulers of Prussia and Austria bound them- 
 selves to use their combined power for the 
 support of the French Monarchy against the 
 Revolution. It is the real starting-point of 
 the Revolutionary Wars, though war did not 
 actually break out till nearly a year later. 
 
 The action of the Hapsburgs needs no 
 explanation. The Queen of France was of 
 their family, and had for more than a year been 
 secretly soliciting 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 
 
36 THE PRUSSIAN 
 
 certain dread felt by the Hapsburg dynasty lest 
 the example of France should spread to its own 
 subjiects. 
 
 It was otherwise with Prussia. The fate of 
 Marie Antoinette, the fate of the French royal 
 family, were nothing to the Hohenzollerns. 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 
 established must always find it more or less to 
 its advantage to support tyranny against the 
 assertion 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 Hohenzollerns. It may, how- 
 ever, be reasonably 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 aggression, the hope of material gain. 
 
 France was weak. That alone was a good 
 Prussian reason for attacking her. Her armies 
 were disorganized and largely worthless. Her 
 executive was betraying the national cause. 
 
HATH SAID IN HIS HEART— 37 
 
 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 
 European peoples, 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 inkling. 
 
 To make an armed assault on a neighbour 
 who happened to be at the moment in difficul- 
 ties was a proceeding thoroughly in harmony 
 with the Frederician tradition. As for the 
 clause in their joint declaration whereby the 
 allied sovereigns (the Emperor probably mean- 
 ing 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 
 anyx)ther moment of the long struggle France 
 would, one may pretty safely say, have shared 
 the fate of Poland. 
 
38 THE PRUSSIAN 
 
 The Declaration of Pillnitz was followed, 
 after many months of hesitation, by a joint 
 invasion of France by the Austrian and Prus- 
 sian 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 unexpectedly, came the check at 
 Valmy and the retreat. 
 
 With the wonderful epic of the French 
 resistance I am not here concerned. I am only 
 concerned with the attitude of Prussia towards 
 it; and that attitude becomes at this point 
 exceedingly interesting. In January 1793 
 King Louis died by the hand of the execu- 
 tioner. In the spring of the same year the 
 Revolutionary Tribunal was set up and the first 
 Committee of the Public Safety chosen. Be- 
 fore the summer was over the Girondins had 
 fallen and that ruthless, but very necessary, 
 military 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 
 
HATH SAID IN HIS HEART^ 39 
 
 joined the Coalition against the Republic. 
 But, as the anger of the hqnest enemies of the 
 Revolution grows and spreads, it is very notice- 
 able that the eagerness of Prussia, who with 
 Austria had inaugurated the crusade, percep- 
 tibly wanes. 
 
 The conquest of France was not, then, to be 
 so easy a job, 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 formidable 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 deci- 
 sive victory over the Austrians in Wattignies. 
 Another victory follows at Fleurus in January 
 1794. By July 1794 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 
 compensations elsewhere. In 1795 she added 
 yet another 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 
 
40 THE PRUSSIAN 
 
 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 overrun 
 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 tem- 
 porized; 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 Russia, subsidies from Eng- 
 land. Frederick William 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 audi- 
 ence, Napoleon was annihilating the Austrian 
 and Russian armies at Austerlitz; and a 
 friendly epistle conveying to the conqueror the 
 congratulations of the King of Prussia and 
 offering him an honourable and permanent 
 alliance was hastily substituted. So matters 
 went on. The Prussian statesmen alternately 
 
HATH SAID IN HIS HEART— 41 
 
 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 Con- 
 queror, counted for nothing, until Napoleon 
 blundered into the invasion of Russia, 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 help- 
 less non-combatants. Torture was freely 
 resorted to. The full story of these abomina- 
 tions 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 outbreaks of savagery were doubtless 
 spontaneous. It is probable that the Prussian 
 atrocities, like those recently committed in 
 
42 THE PRUSSIAN 
 
 Belgium and France, were "deliberate and 
 organized. Indeed, a generation before, Fred- 
 erick had treated Saxony in rnuch the same 
 fashion. 
 
 At Vienna Prussia made some attempt to 
 revive her favourite project for partitioning 
 France, but her more honest allies refused, and 
 insisted that the restored Bourbons should 
 receive their inheritance intact. Frederick 
 William, however, obtained a considerable 
 accession of territory in Germany itself, includ- 
 ing the wealthy and strategically invaluable 
 Rhine provinces. 
 
 Nevertheless the epoch of the Revolutionary 
 Wars was not an epoch suited to the full 
 development of Prussian policy. It was a 
 time of gpreat passions and high ideals clashing 
 with each other. It had the smell of the morn- 
 ing, 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 confusion. But it was in cota- 
 stant danger of being struck down by the great 
 blows that were being exchanged ovfer its head. 
 
HATH SAID IN HIS HEART— 43 
 
 It was the settled unbelief of eighteenth- 
 century Europe that had made possible the 
 raids of Frederick and the establishment of 
 Prussian power. The Frederician tradition 
 could hardly succeed so solidly again until the 
 fires of the Revolution 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 Revolution 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 began to crack and crumble. Much 
 of that structure 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 which we associate with the 
 year 1848. It is of special importance in con- 
 nection with the subject of this book because 
 
44 THE PRUSSIAN 
 
 its failure (in the main) 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 move- 
 ments 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 English model — a thing 
 wholly unnational — ^was destroyed 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 ex- 
 pression of the national will demanded that 
 popular dictatorship to which the French have 
 so continually recurred and will probably recur 
 again. In Italy the King of Sardinia, stand- 
 ing 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 
 
HATH SAID IN HIS HEART— 45 
 
 and in Hungary insurrectionary movements 
 were crushed by a combination of the rulers of 
 Russia, Austria and Prussia. In England the 
 last rally of the Chartists collapsed on Ken- 
 nington Common. 
 
 The Prussian struggle is of interest from the 
 point of view of this book mainly 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 
 Frederick had sunk into the Prussian mind. 
 Bismarck was not, like Frederick, a man whose 
 whole soul was possessed of evil. He was 
 neither an Atheist nor a pervert. He seems to 
 have held sincerely to the vague Lutheranism 
 of his upbringing, and he was beyond question 
 a most affectionate 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 public affairs were outside 
 the sphere of morals. Those who think this 
 
46 THE PRUSSIAN 
 
 incredible cannot have realized 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 moral standard, 
 will nevertheless consent under pressure of an 
 evil creed to aboijiinations such as human sacri- 
 fice or cannibalism in earlier times, or in our 
 own time to "eugenics," and even to such 
 filthiness 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 froni annihilation by the revolu- 
 tionary movement; and, when his defensive 
 methods had succeeded, he emerged as an 
 adviser, and later as the principal adviser, of 
 the Prussian Crown. 
 
 Frederick William IV, who was King of 
 Prussia during the revolutionary movement of 
 1848, was a sovereign whose mind was from 
 the first menaced and finally overwhelmed by 
 ihat insanity which has continually attacked the 
 
HATH SAID IN HIS HEART— 47 
 
 HohenzoUern dynasty. In 1857 he was com- 
 pelled 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 
 HohenzoUerns. From the beginning of the 
 Danish trouble, when he would keep repeating 
 the incontestable but (as it seemed to Bismarck) 
 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 violences, piracies and frauds of 
 Prussia were committed. 
 
 That fact is not without interest since it 
 illustrates in another aspect the fixed character 
 of the Prussian State. It was a monarchy, and 
 virtually an autocratic monarchy, but not really 
 a personal monarchy. The will of the indivi- 
 dual king counted for almost as little as the 
 will of the people. The Thing that governed 
 and still governs Prussia was a tradition. The 
 
48 THE PRUSSIAN 
 
 real autocrat 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 certainly go to a criminal for the 
 truth about his crimes. But the very curious 
 psychology of Bismarck 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 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 speciously 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 
 
HATH SAID IN HIS HEART— 49 
 
 on all Germany of the Prussian yoke. Ger- 
 many 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 misunderstand the man and his 
 policy. Unity, if that were all, could have 
 been achieved in I848, 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 receive it at their 
 hands. The offer was refused. Not unity but 
 domination was what Prussia was seeking, and 
 domination, even with a Hohenzollern on the 
 Imperial Throne, would at that date have met 
 with active resistance and failed. It required 
 long years of tortuous diplomacy and three 
 carefully engineered wars to prepare the ground 
 for it and make it possible. Bismarck some- 
 times used for public purposes the cant of 
 German Nationalism, but you will find nothing 
 but the chilliest contempt for it and its pro- 
 fessors in his private reminiscences. 
 
 One of the first problems with which 
 
50 THE PRUSSIAN 
 
 Bismarck was faced was a legacy left behind 
 to his people's undoing by the worst of Fred- 
 erick's crimes — the partition of Poland. The 
 ever-living agony of the nation that was mur- 
 dered, yet could not and cannot die, was again 
 producing disturbances dangerous to the par- 
 titioning Powers and to all Europe. The 
 Tsar was weary of his part in the evil inherit- 
 ance, and of all the woes it had brought him 
 and his people. The wiser Russian statesmen 
 were for a policy of conciliation, and Alexan- 
 der II, a reformer, the liberator of the serfs, 
 was disposed to listen to them. Bismarck him- 
 self tells us that "feeling in St. Petersburg 
 remained for a good while undecided, being 
 dominated in about equal measure by abso- 
 lutist principles and Polish sympathies." 
 Meanwhile Austria, France and England were 
 urging the Tsar to grant the Poles a Constitu- 
 tion with liberty for their religion and their 
 language. It was Prussia that threw her whole 
 weight 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 — 
 
HATH SAID IN HIS HEART— 51 
 
 " The conflict of opinion was very lively in 
 St. Petersburg 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 insurrec- 
 tion which had broken out on January i, 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 mili- 
 tary convention was entered into between the 
 two Governments. The Tsar promised not tcr 
 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 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 
 
52 THE PRUSSIAN 
 
 in this country who are disposed 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 Russian Government and 
 protesting against Russian 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 as 
 the English generally do not. They know that 
 Russian opinion, even Russian official opinion, 
 has always been strongly divided on the Polish 
 question, that there has always been in the 
 highest places, in the palace itself, an active 
 and influential Pro- Polish party which has 
 more than once nearly got its way; they also 
 know that the steady and relentless influence 
 which has ever thwarted such hopes has been 
 
HATH SAID IN HIS HEART— 53 
 
 the determined opposition of the ruling house 
 of Prussia, the original instigators of the dis- 
 memberment and ever since the untiring 
 supporters of the oppression of Poland. And 
 they know that the war which has broken Prus- 
 sian influence in Russia for ever, and has 
 already given a native name to the Russian 
 capital, must inevitably have meant the resur- 
 rection 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 
 appetite for committing new ones. She was 
 already looking round for some one whom she 
 could easily and profitably rob, and 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 
 Biimarck might find it convenient to put for- 
 ward many more or less inconsistent excuses 
 for his. policy, pleading now that he was pro- 
 tecting the oppressed German population of 
 
54 THE PRUSSIAN 
 
 Holstein, whose immemorial rights he subse- 
 quently treated as waste paper ; now that he was 
 merely carrying out the decision of the German 
 Confederation whose judgment, when almost 
 immediately afterwards given against him, he 
 dismissed with contempt; 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 loyalty 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 some- 
 thing better than existing conditions, culmin- 
 ated, in my judgment, in the acquisition 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 Hohenzollem and the Jahde 
 district; Frederick William III the Rhine 
 
HATH SAID IN HIS HEART— 55 
 
 province; Frederick William II, Poland; 
 Frederick II, Silesia; Frederick William I, old 
 Hither Pomerania; the Great Elector, Farther 
 Pomerania and Magdeburg, Minden, etc. ; and 
 I encouraged him to do likewise." 
 
 To pick a quarrel with Denmark was not 
 difficult, nor was k difficult to find a cause of 
 quarrel in which Prussia might look for the 
 support of the Germanies as a whole. The 
 King of Denmark was also Duke of Schleswig- 
 Holstein, and as such a member of the German 
 Confederation. The population of one of 
 these duchies was almost 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 indecisive 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 CroAsm. The German Powers 
 maintained that the succession had nothing to 
 do with Denmark, and was a matter for the 
 Germanic body. A pretender was brought 
 
56 THE PRUSSIAN 
 
 forward in the person of the Prince of At^usten- 
 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 of Augustenberg. His views on the 
 Danish question were simply those of an en- 
 lightened burglar. 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 
 intrigues was that the Danes found their 
 country invaded by the united armies of Prussia 
 and Austria. 
 
 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. Palmer- 
 ston would have liked to have saved Denmark, 
 but in fact he only hastened her ruin. Though 
 at the height of his power and though pos- 
 sessed of a physical vigour, which in view of 
 his age struck men as miraculous, his judgment, 
 as I think those who study the story of his last 
 
HATH SAID IN HIS HEART— 57 
 
 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 regard 
 to the Emperor Napoleon, whom he had been 
 the first to congratulate on the coup d'etat. 
 These suspicions had led him, though an old 
 friend to Polish aspirations, to hang back when 
 Napoleon III proposed to meet the armed 
 menace of the Prussian military convention by a 
 counter-menace. Napoleon was angry at what 
 he considered a desertion, and his resentment 
 led him to refuse effective 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 
 
68 THE PRUSSIAN 
 
 on the various parties concerned, on the 
 Austrian Government, on the States of the 
 German Confederation, as well as on the Prince 
 of Augustenberg, that Prussia having got her 
 troops into the duchies, had no intention what- 
 ever of ever taking them out again, Bismarck 
 was not much concerned for the woes of the 
 poor, duped pretender, who, perhaps, did not 
 deserve much sympathy, or for the protests of 
 the Germanic Body, which he always speaks of 
 in his memoirs as a kind of joke. But Austria 
 might be troublesome; so to Austria proposi- 
 tions 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 Hell. 
 
 Austria refused this amiable proposal, and 
 insisted on convoking the German Confedera- 
 tion. The Federation instantly and all but 
 unanimously voted Prussia guilty of a breach of 
 faith and an offence against the public law oi 
 Germany. Prussia's reply was a sudden and 
 successful attack on her ally. 
 
 Austria was unprepared. The preparations 
 of Prussia had been made far in advance and 
 
HATH SAID IN HIS HEART— 59 
 
 were perfect. The new breechloadifig 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 judg- 
 ment on her, and she had it very thoroughly. 
 Hanover, Hesse-Cassell, Nassau, the free city 
 of Frankfort, and other northern allies of 
 Austria, 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 practical vassalage 
 though retaining a technical independence. 
 The Catholic States of the south, Bavaria, 
 Wurtemburg, Baden, had to purchase the in- 
 tegrity of their territory at the cost of accepting 
 Prussian alliance, which was to prove, as it 
 was meant to prove, fatal to the independence 
 and at last, perhaps, to the soul of South 
 Germany. In point of fact Austria's collapse, 
 surrender and abandonment of her allies had 
 delivered all the Germanics into a Prussian 
 
60 THE PRUSSIAN 
 
 grip. There was hardly any longer an alterna- 
 tive. Every German State must now accept 
 such terms of vassalage as Prussia offered, for 
 it really depended 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 Hohenzol- 
 lerns should not only reign but rule and by 
 means of which, under whatever forms might 
 be necessary to disguise the process, Prussian 
 government 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. Cause was found 
 for a quarrel with France. 
 
 The French diplomatists were themselves 
 not free from blame in the matter. They both 
 underrated the power and misunderstood the 
 temper of the antagonist with whom they had 
 to deal. They thought France far better pre- 
 
HATH SAID IN HIS HEART— 61 
 
 pared and Prussia far less well prepared for 
 war than each respectively was. They do not 
 appear to have known that the rest of the Ger- 
 man States would be compelled to follow 
 Prussia. Finally, by a fatal miscalculation, 
 they imagined that Prussia wanted peace, 
 whereas, in fact, though the Emperor probably 
 sought for peace honestly, the men who domin- 
 ated Prussian policy, and especially the 
 greatest of them, were eager for war. 
 
 As we now know, the formal dispute over 
 the proposed candidature of a HohenzoUern 
 for the vacant Spanish throne, would never of 
 itself have led to war. The candidature had 
 been withdrawn, and though France was press- 
 ing, rather rashly and over-emphatically, for 
 further assurances, there was nothing even 
 remotely approaching a threat of war. There 
 was not a diplomatist in Europe who, after 
 the withdrawal of the candidature 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 
 
62 THE PRUSSIAN 
 
 himself tells us, he had formed the intention 
 of resigning his office. He did not fulfil this 
 intention, for, when his spirits were at their 
 lowest, fortune brought him an extraordinary 
 opportunity 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 unprecedented, I suppose, in all 
 the shifty and dubious records of European 
 diplomacy. He deliberately forged a public 
 document. 
 
 Bismarck was staying at Ems; his friends 
 Moltke and Roon 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 
 explained that the French Ambassador had 
 asked for certain promises which the King had 
 not felt able to give without further considera- 
 tion, and Bismarck's advice was asked as to 
 whether this incident of the negotiations should 
 be communicated to the Press and to the Prus- 
 sian envoys at foreign courts. It was added that 
 the King did not, at that stage of the proceed- 
 ings, propose to have any further personal 
 
HATH SAID IN HIS HEART— 63 
 
 interviews with the Ambassador — the implica- 
 tion being, of course, that negotiations would 
 be continued through the ordinary 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 received bore an entirely different 
 meaning from that of the document he pro- 
 fessed to produce is acknowledged in his own 
 memoirs without the smallest attempt at con- 
 cealment or apology. Nay, he recalls compla- 
 cently how delighted Moltke was at the com- 
 plete change which Bismarck had effected in 
 the sense of the telegram. " Now it has a 
 different ring," remarked that veteran soldier. 
 
 The fraud succeeded. The French Minis- 
 ters saw the telegram published by authority in 
 the Press. They could not know that it was 
 a forgery. They did what Bismarck confess- 
 edly meant them to do. They declared war. 
 
64 THE PRUSSIAN HATH SAID— 
 
 It is unnecessary to say what followed. An 
 amazing absence of foresight on the part of 
 the Emperor and his advicers — though the 
 " Liberals " in the new chamber must bear a 
 share of the responsibility — left the French 
 defences quite insufficient. 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, continued 
 for long a heroic and hopeless struggle. But 
 the end was already certain. France was 
 saddled with a monstrous indemnity, which her 
 peasants paid with a readiness 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 incapacity 
 of her conquerors for the work of the govern- 
 ment. And for a generation all Europe lay at 
 the feet of the Anti-Christ. 
 
CHAPTER III 
 
 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 exploits of Frederick the Great. Granted 
 that the reappearance of Prussia in the r61e of 
 international brigand is explicable by the per- 
 sistence of the Frederician tradition, why was 
 that brigandage tolerated by Europe? Why 
 were the three protesting Powers not as ready 
 to use armed force for the defence of Polish 
 liberty as Prussia was ready to use that force 
 for its repression? Why did England at the 
 last moment 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 aggres- 
 sive military monarchy at his doors ? Why did 
 all the Powers allow France to be coerced 
 into accepting the terms dictated by her 
 
 conqueror ? 
 
 r 65 
 
66 THE PRUSSIAN 
 
 We have seen that in the eighteenth century 
 the neglect of the European Powers to combine 
 at once against Frederick, and the failure of 
 the 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 weak- 
 ening and virtual disappearance of the con- 
 ception of a united Christendom 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 un- 
 achieved, the idea of a common conscience of 
 Europe was, as a fruit of the Revolution 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, acci- 
 dental contributory causes) in the appearance 
 and growing strength, especially in Western 
 Europe, of a certain doctrine and spirit as 
 
HATH SAID IN HIS HEART— 67 
 
 remote from the original ideals of the Revo- 
 lution as it was unchivalrous, and intensely 
 unchristian. 
 
 Though this thing began to be recogniz- 
 able and even recognized very soon after the 
 end of the Napoleonic wars, it was long be- 
 fore a name was found that defined it with 
 any exactitude. A name has of late years 
 been coined for it, a name with which etymolo- 
 gists 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 Revolution 
 was emphatically a military thing-, and its 
 noblest aspect the great legend of armed 
 national resistance to an armed Europe, yet 
 the only people whom Pacifism at all infected 
 were those so-called " Radicals " and " Social- 
 ists " whose ruling passion was really a hatred 
 of the Christian name. Here, however, where 
 the doctrine took its first and strongest hold, 
 though generally popular with " Freethinkers " 
 of various kinds, it found its main strength 
 in those religious sects which have departed 
 
68 THE PRUSSIAN 
 
 farthest from the old creed of Christendom. 
 The phrase may, therefore, appear paradoxical, 
 and it will be well to amplify it. 
 
 To my mind Pacifism seems merely a sort 
 of allotropic modification of that Atheism which 
 Frsderick the Great made the foundation of 
 the Prussian State. Its basis is materialistic, 
 and in all its different forms of expression its 
 ultimate appeal is always to one of two dogmas, 
 both of which are obviously dogmas of 
 Materialism. One is that the sole test of 
 national policy is 4ts 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 per- 
 suasion, the other a young member of squire- 
 archy whose incapacity to think is to most of 
 our minds redeemed by a power over the 
 
HATH SAID IN HIS HEART— 69 
 
 English language as an instrument of music 
 to which no parallel can be found in the whole 
 history of our literature. 
 
 Much as Richard 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, 
 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 syn- 
 chronized with three others. Firstly, the naval 
 predominance which she had enjoyed through- 
 out the war had given her for twenty years a 
 virtual monopoly of oversea trade; secondly, 
 her capital, long ago conveniently 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 England and Scotland a 
 
70 THE PRUSSIAN 
 
 succession of great men who laid the founda- 
 tions of the science of political economy. 
 
 Cobden was the child as well as the inter- 
 preter of these things. He was perfectly fitted 
 for his task. What he saw he saw clearly, and 
 could expound 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 necessarily involve a diminu- 
 tion of wealth. To the national point of view 
 from which both wars and tariffs may in par- 
 ticular cases be justified, even on materialistic 
 grounds, by their ultimate results, he was 
 simply blind. It should be added that he had 
 the strength which is derived from strict con- 
 sistency, and that he was (what was rare in a 
 politician even then, and would have been a 
 miracle a generation or so later) really incor- 
 ruptible. His influence on British policy, 
 though indirect — and perhaps the more be- 
 cause 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, 
 
HATH SAID IN HIS HEART— 71 
 
 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 this 
 country 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 
 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 Revolution and to Byron, more 
 shocked at physical 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 Paci- 
 fism, 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 irrevelant to 
 
72 THE PRUSSIAN 
 
 my subject. It is, however, the very purpose 
 of this book to show the triumph of Prussia 
 as the triumph 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 rfeady to appeal to arms. The true 
 opposite of the denial of right (which was the 
 fundamental dogma of Prussia) was the asser- 
 tion of right — if necessary, by force and at any 
 cost of life and suffering. But the doctrine 
 which was more and more identified with 
 " Liberalism " in Western Europe was not the 
 assertion of right, but its non-assertion. Philo^ 
 sophically it was founded on the same first 
 principle as was the Prussian doctrine, and 
 consequently in practice it was its ally and 
 accomplice. For it is obvious that if there are 
 two men, one of whom is always telling a 
 brigand that he is a strong man and 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 
 
HATH SAID IN HIS HEART— 73 
 
 is, as I say, obvious that the effect which their 
 action tends to produce is the same effect, 
 namely, the profit and aggrandizement of the 
 brigand. 
 
 Palmerston and Louis Napoleon, though 
 certainly 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 interven- 
 tion 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, 
 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 influence gained strength; for many 
 of the Pacifists, both of the sentimental and of 
 
74 THE PRUSSIAN 
 
 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 dis- 
 turbance which a great war between equal 
 European Powers would cause. In France the 
 extreme Republican party, which immediately 
 after 1870 had been especially the champion 
 of militant patriotism, became infected, through 
 its secret anti-Christian societies and its alliance 
 with the Jews, with the new doctrine, and that 
 doctrine seemed almost dominant politically 
 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 suc- 
 cess. Even Frederick the Great had been in 
 no such 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, however, Prussia could claim 
 
HATH ^AID IN HIS HEART— 75 
 
 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 in- 
 vincible in war, and therefore a proper object 
 of universal imitation. It may be well to take 
 two points separately before considering their 
 combined effect. 
 
 The Germans Eire a European people whose 
 peculiarities for good and evil are pretty well 
 known to those who have tried to analyse the 
 complex which we call Europe. They are a 
 people 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 the end of thought a final con- 
 clusion and a dogma. They specially love and 
 can create music. They are grave, sentimental, 
 and somewhat deficient in humour. 
 
76 THE PRUSSIAN 
 
 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 supplied the working model. Not 
 until it is destroyed will the Germans again 
 be able to make their contribution — an admit- 
 tedly valuable contribution — ^to European 
 civilization. 
 
 Theoretically the German Empire is federal, 
 and the King of Prussia merely happens also 
 to be German Emperor. In fact, the governing 
 machine of Prussia dominates the whole of the 
 Germanies, and the means by which this 
 domination 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 profes- 
 sional, but a conscript, army; and in the 
 ordinary way it would be much more difficult 
 to make of a conscript army an instrument 
 fitted for the complete control and subjugation 
 
HATH SAID IN HIS HEART— 77 
 
 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 system 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 terror- 
 ized subservience which the Prussian ideal even 
 more urgently demands. 
 
 Firstly, it is not true of the German Empire, 
 as it is of the French Republic, that every man 
 is a trained soldier. The troops who have been 
 subjected to the severe and even savage dis- 
 cipline which the Prussian military system 
 demanded, and who constitute the real effec- 
 tive army of the Empire, are drawn for prac- 
 tical purposes entirely from the labouring class, 
 and mainly from the rural labouring class. In 
 all other classes exemptions were always 
 numerous. Those of the wealthier classes who 
 did not get off their service altogether were 
 allowed to serve in volunteer corps under 
 merely formal restrictions, living as they chose 
 and only bound to put in a certain number of 
 
78 THE PRUSSIAN 
 
 drills. It was the Prussian theory — ^we have 
 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 made it possible 
 for the German commanders, without prejudice 
 to the political principle upon which this 
 arrangement 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- 
 commissioned officers, the sergeants, were also 
 professional, though, of course, men of another 
 class. It was their special business to insure 
 the discipline and break the spirit of successive 
 drafts of conscripts. 
 
 For the essential character of Prussian dis- 
 
HATH SAID IN HIS HEART— 79 
 
 ciplinary methods was in no way changed by 
 the transition from a professional to a conscript 
 army. Terror was still the single weapon used 
 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 emphasize the fact 
 that the principles 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 Europe. 
 
 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 Govern- 
 ment 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 Reichstag as Frederick II had to 
 fear libellers and malcontents. The iron disci- 
 pline of the army and the naturally unwarlike 
 
80 THE PRUSSIAN 
 
 cEaracter 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." 
 
 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 i860 and 1870, 
 one does not see that there was anything so 
 very extraordinary to boast about. Prussia, in 
 alliance with Austria and with the backing of 
 all the minor German States, had succeeded 
 in breaking the little kingdom of Denmark. 
 That, certainly, 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 
 efficiency of Austria than for the military 
 prowess of Prussia. What affected the public 
 imagination was undoubtedly the defeat of 
 
HATH SAID IN HIS HEART— 81 
 
 France, and the defeat of France had un- 
 doubtedly about it 3 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 of war went against the French, and 
 Paris was taken. Well, 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 Europe? 
 
 I think that the answer may be found in a 
 temperamental peculiarity perhaps native to the 
 Germans which their Prussian rulers have 
 assiduously 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 neighbours came to believe it also. 
 This was specially the case in this country. 
 
 In this country, indeed, the ground had 
 already been prepared for the acceptance of 
 
82 THE PRUSSIAN 
 
 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 "cousins"; they were 
 fellow "Teutons." If, therefore, they were 
 such fine fellows, there was a presumption that 
 we were fine fellows too. All history was ran- 
 sacked and distorted to support this view of 
 our relationship. The usual form which such 
 distortion took here 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 mer- 
 cenaries 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 civilized 
 part of the Roman 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 that 
 the great, handsome, valorous, freedom-loving, 
 
HATH SAID IN HIS HEART— 83 
 
 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, handsome, valor- 
 ous and the rest than their neighbours, and 
 proceeded to point out that the Roman legion- 
 aries 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 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 Narbonne being 
 tactfully passed over), so such an obvious 
 Frenchman as William of Falaise became, on 
 the strength of the one thirty-second part of 
 Scandinavian blood which he may perhaps 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 Revolution and Napo- 
 
84 THE PRUSSIAN 
 
 leon, 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 this country. 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 general, a better military organization, 
 and, above all, better artillery. But the coin- 
 cidence was too marked not to make a profound 
 impression on those already predisposed to find 
 Teutons efficient and Latins decadent. That 
 impression became an all but universal dogma, 
 and even survived the change of foreign policy 
 which made us the allies of the French and the 
 antagonists 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 
 
HATH SAID IN HIS HEART— 85 
 
 to defeat, to confront unaided the gigantic 
 power of Germany. It lasted down to the very 
 moment of war, and I cannot better illustrate 
 its character than by taking a book written 
 just before the outbreak of that war, and pub- 
 lished after the author's death only the other 
 day. 
 
 It is called Germany and England, and 
 consists of lectures delivered by the late Pro- 
 fessor J. A. Cramb, reprinted from his notes. 
 It is described on the cover as "A Reply to 
 Bernhardi," but this sub-title seems singularly 
 inappropriate, and I cannot but doubt whether 
 Professor Cramb would have accepted it as a 
 fair description of his work. So far from being 
 a reply to Bernhardi, the book seems to me to 
 be a whole-hearted welcome to Bernhardi, an 
 enthusiastic endorsement of Bernhardi, an em- 
 bracing of Bernhardi's beautiful big boots. AH 
 the silly nonsense that Bernhardi talks, when- 
 ever he is dealing with matters outside the 
 immediate scope of his profession, is here 
 reverently reproduced and humbly accepted as 
 a proper guide for the future development of 
 European civilization. 
 
 Professor Cramb, as his introductory chapter 
 
86 THE PRUSSIAN 
 
 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 
 answer 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 
 Germany and Europe "as in very deed they 
 are " more clearly than was formerly possible. 
 We can safely say, for example, that the Ger- 
 man Empire, at the time when Professor Cramb 
 was writing, possessed in reserve a very large 
 and powerful army, smaller than that of Russia, 
 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 equipped and prepared, 
 so far as mechanical means could prepare it, 
 for the aggressive war which the Prussian 
 Government had long meditated; 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 
 
HATH SAID IN HIS HEART— 87 
 
 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 considerable superior- 
 ity in machine 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 development, not, 
 however, without some loss to vital interests, 
 a peasant population having in many parts been 
 converted into an urban proletariat. It might 
 quite safely be added that Prussia (and Ger- 
 many, so far as it was Prussianized) had lost 
 such power of thinking as it ever possessed, 
 and had become altogether incapable of litera- 
 
88 THE PRUSSIAN 
 
 ture and of the plastic arts. In these depart- 
 ments it had little to offer but a choice between 
 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 Ger- 
 many that of all England's enemies she is by 
 far the greatest; and by 'greatness' I m^an 
 not merely magnitude, nor her millions of sol- 
 diers, her millions of inhabitants; I mean 
 grandeur of soul. She is the greatest and most 
 heroic enemy — if she is our enemy — that Eng- 
 land, 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 century we fought against Hol- 
 land; 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 than France under 
 Louis XIV." 
 
 Well, sixteenth-century Spain discovered 
 
HATH SAID IN HIS HEART 89 
 
 America. She conquered with a handful of 
 men all the southern part of that hemisphere. 
 She accomplished a miracle which had not been 
 attempted since the Roman Empire, and which 
 has perhaps never been successfully attempted 
 again; she welded a whole continent of bar- 
 baric tribes into the civilization of Europe so 
 effectively that that civilization even survived 
 her own downfall. She also produced the 
 pictures of Velasquez and Murillo, the plays 
 of Lopez and Calderoni, the great satire of 
 Cervantes. 
 
 The France of Louis XIV was not only the 
 greatest power in Europe in arms and diplo- 
 macy, but incomparably the greatest in letters. 
 She could boast of the whole cycle of classical 
 dramatists, of the comedies of Moli^re, of the 
 philosophy of Descartes, of the theology of 
 Bossuet and Pascal. The ruling class of 
 Europe everywhere learnt her language, her 
 code of manners and her literary tradition. 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 mythology of Professor Haeckel, 
 
90 THE PRUSSIAN 
 
 the biblical fancies of Professor Harnack, the 
 public buildings of Berlin, several statues of 
 Bismarck and the Kaiser, and a large output 
 of pornographic picture post-cards. 
 
 Now, if you ask why Professor Cramlj 
 thought of the German Empire in so extrava- 
 gant a fashion, why he thought the Germans 
 such heroic fellows, 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 convic- 
 tion. 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 
 consider 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 acceptance of certain doctrines 
 which Prussia had originated, and which in the 
 conquests of Prussia seemed to triumph. They 
 may be set out fairly succinctly. 
 
HATH SAID IN HIS HEART— 91 
 
 (i) Political Materialism. — That all matters 
 of politics, and especially all matters of war, 
 are matters of calculation. That personal 
 valour counts for nothing. That the sense of 
 personal freedom and initiative counts for 
 nothing. Above all, that the energy created 
 by the sense of fighting in a just cause counts 
 for nothing. That if you tot up the numbers 
 and the quantity and quality of armaments you 
 can prophesy the result 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 
 sometimes in a wholly different sense. Many 
 of us have called ourselves Imperialists, mean- 
 ing that we wished to make the connection 
 between this country and the commonwealths 
 and dominions which British energy and the 
 
92 THE PRUSSIAN 
 
 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 infection during 
 the long years of Prussian supremacy. 
 
 (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 
 offence, that treaties might be broken and 
 promises repudiated by a nation bent on ful- 
 filling its " Destiny " — ^these ideas were widely 
 canvassed. Even Bismarck's forgery found 
 defenders in this country. 
 
 (4) The Efficiency of Servitude. — By this I 
 mean the theory, held to be more or less justi- 
 fied 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 condition of unquestioning obedi- 
 ence to the regulations framed by its rulers. 
 In other words, that the way to make a strong 
 nation is to make a servile people. This essen- 
 
HATH SAID IN HIS HEART— 93 
 
 tial Prussian conception is one to which I have 
 referred only incidentally 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 Garland, notes a 
 contemporary reference to " the complete sub- 
 ordination to the State" of the Prussians of 
 1870, and puts it forward as the explanation 
 of their victories 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 " bound- 
 less 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 
 
94 THE PRUSSIAN 
 
 at that moment — that whether it was good or 
 bad that men should be completely subordin- 
 ated 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 
 Roman religion of civic patriotism, or the high 
 Republican enthusiasm of 1793 which suffered 
 the Conscription and the Terror that it might 
 save 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 French monarchy, and 
 which still, in spite of a thousand errors and 
 crimes, unites the Russians 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. 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 
 
HATH SAID IN HIS HEART— 95 
 
 can find within itself the energy necessary for 
 redistribution. But Prussian supremacy un- 
 doubtedly helped the movement of all indus- 
 trial 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 destroyed, easiest; secondly, because 
 it was the country in which the new organiza- 
 tion of the social system on a servile basis had 
 been pushed nearest completion; and thirdly 
 (and this was what counted for most), because 
 the Prussians could point to the unchallenge- 
 able fact of military victory — a victory attri- 
 buted by themselves and also by many foreign 
 observers to the " discipline," that is to say 
 the servility, of their social relations. 
 
 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 divisions of 
 all citizens into two classes, free and unfree. 
 Our own Insurance Act — the biggest step taken 
 towards the Servile State in this country — ^was 
 avowedly borrowed in its essentials from 
 
96 THE PRUSSIAN HATH SAID— 
 
 Prussia, and the attempt to introduce a similar 
 system in France, after having been passed by 
 the Chamber and blessed by M. Jaures and the 
 leading Socialists, 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 Reform " (which 
 our simpler 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 " Guggenheimen 
 System," or by pointing to the bright examples 
 of Jena or Kopenick or Hesse-Darmstadt. 
 And all these projects, even when ostenta- 
 tiously fathered by professed Socialists, have 
 had two things in common : they have been 
 servile in their ultimate basis and assumption, 
 and they have contained some insult to human 
 dignity, which is the image of God. 
 
CHAPTER IV 
 
 THE NEMESIS 
 
 Dante, I think, says somewhere of the Souls 
 in Hell that, being cut off from the source of 
 Eternal Reason, they are unable to philoso- 
 phize. The same is true of Prussians. 
 
 A friend of mine once showed me an insane 
 and entertaining book called Breaks, which 
 bore this even more entertaining sub-title : 
 " Being the Falsifications of the One Thought 
 of Frater Perdurabo, 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 essen- 
 
 H 97 
 
98 THE PRUSSIAN 
 
 tially a destructive and barbaric thought, a 
 thought which makes all further thought un- 
 necessary and . impossible, for clearly if there 
 is no meaning in the Universe it is waste of 
 time to inquire 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 Fred- 
 erick, therefore, permitted of no true develop- 
 ment, 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 
 suicide which we are now witnessing, because 
 it is the keynote of that process., The Prus- 
 sians deliberately neglected the soul (in which 
 Frederick the Great did not believe), and con- 
 sequently 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 their thinking was to the eyes of 
 civilized men, bad thinking. Like the Damned, 
 they were cut off from the source of Eternal 
 Reason and could not philosophize. 
 
HATH SAID IN HIS HEART— 99 
 
 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 right, as such men are often right about 
 essentials. 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 Prussia's immense output of pro- 
 fessors spread through Germany, and from 
 Germany to all Europe, and especially to this 
 country. The professors, as any one with a 
 reasonable degree of culture and intelligence 
 could see, were fools, but that apparently did 
 not matter. 
 
 There was a man called Haeckel. He had 
 attained some legitimate distinction as a care- 
 ful student of the habits of the lower inverte- 
 brates, 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 dog- 
 matic Materialism. There was nothing in them 
 that had not been said much more persuasively 
 
100 THE PRUSSIAN 
 
 by Lucretius nearly two thousand years before. 
 The only part of his work which could be 
 regarded as in any way original was a com- 
 plicated mythology wholly unconnected with 
 ^.ny kind of evidence, including a Pedigree of 
 Man, made up entirely out of his own head 
 and possessing rather less scientific authority 
 than the ancestries of the Homeric gods and 
 heroes. But Haeckel was a Prussian pro- 
 fessor, 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 
 Materialism to preach. All that he had to say 
 was that he liked some parts of the Gospels and 
 disliked 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, Miracle and a Supernatural Authority by 
 which man could be judged. Harnack was not 
 
HATH SAID IN HIS HEART— 101 
 
 without scholarship, but his knowledge of 
 Greek had no relation to his conclusions, which 
 were admittedly based on his conception of the 
 " psychology " of the principal Figure. When- 
 ever 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 circumstances, he scented an " interpola- 
 tion." Professor Harnack 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 
 a historian. He had only one subject, the 
 magnificence of himself and his fellow Prus- 
 sians and the inferiority to them of the rest 
 of mankind. Of this historical accuracy one 
 may judge from a sample quoted by Professor 
 Cramb 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, too well- 
 instructed in history, know that Cromwell's 
 success was mainly due to the superiority of 
 
102 THE PRUSSIAN 
 
 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 
 cannot be illustrated adequately except by see- 
 ing it in relation to a man very different from 
 these platitudinous barbarians, a man of way- 
 ward, perverse and unbalanced, but unques- 
 tionable 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 and the Irish. Such 
 men are usually a little contemptuous of the 
 illusions engendered by patriotism. They have 
 little faith in the aspirations 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 
 
HATH SAID IN HIS HEART— 103 
 
 contains a measure of truth) for the errors and 
 crimes of modern 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 religion which is the soul of Poland as of 
 Ireland. But he missed that great influence 
 as he largely missed the influence of nation- 
 ality. He had nothing on which to feed his 
 flaming and towering imagination, except the 
 dregs of Darwinism, which were interpreted by 
 Prussian philosophers 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 philosophy ; and you can quote him 
 on almost every side of every question. He 
 could not reason coherently on a Darwinian 
 or any other basis. His most characteristic 
 aphorism : " Nothing is true, everything is per- 
 missible," obviously puts an end to all reason- 
 ing. He often saw neglected truths, as did 
 
104 THE PRUSSIAN 
 
 Carlyle, by a flash of instinct apparently un- 
 connected with any process of logic. What is 
 truest in his teaching may perhaps be best 
 expressed in words which are not his, but 
 belong to another great phrase-maker, Robert 
 Louis Stevenson : " This civilization of ours is 
 a dingy, ungentlemanly business, it drops so 
 much out of a man." Though, like Stevenson, 
 an invalid (perhaps because of that misfortune), 
 he had real enthusiasm for heroism and for the 
 great human epic of arms. He had a wonder- 
 ful wit, a startling gift of vivid and pungent 
 phrase (" Men do not really desire happiness ; 
 only Englishmen do that."), and he was an 
 admirable rhetorician. But above all he was 
 a poet, with an imagination which could so 
 vivify and transfigure his material as to pro- 
 duce not a feebly depressing mythology like 
 Haeckel's pedigrees, but a Great Myth, a thing 
 which, however irrational, men could worship 
 — 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 theory of 
 evolution. If Man is to be considered simply 
 
HATH SAID IN HIS HEART— 105 
 
 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 supplanted, by his own evolved offspring. 
 Man was not, according to Darwin, the de- 
 scendant of the Monstrous Eft that was lord 
 of valley and hill, but of some insignificant 
 creature that was hopping about between its 
 toes, and if " Man is a creature that must be 
 surpassed," it would seem on the same analogy 
 that he is more likely to be exterminated by 
 some preternaturally intelligent toad or by 
 some creature resembling Mr. Wells' Martians. 
 Nietzsche's conception was a purely imagina- 
 tive one. Such as it was, he used it as a fan- 
 tastic argument for aristocracy. The many 
 must be utterly and ruthlessly sacrificed to the 
 few, because from the few the Superman would 
 be born. 
 
 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 
 answered was who these "few," the potential 
 fathers of the Superman to whom the many 
 were to be sacrificed, were. But as it happened, 
 there was one group of men in Europe that had 
 
106 THE PRUSSIAN 
 
 no difficulty at all in supplying the answer. 
 This was the ruling caste of Prussians. 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 say- 
 ing, " that they are Brave ; that they are Beauti- 
 ful; that they are Incomparably Wise; that 
 they are Ever Victorious. Who can this mean 
 but Us? Are We not Brave and Beautiful 
 and Wise and Victorious? Have We not told 
 each other so for many years? Therefore We 
 are the Master Class and the predestined 
 ancestors 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 Niet- 
 zsche to have his Superman identified with 
 the Prussian Junker. It was like asking Mr. 
 Shaw to recognize 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 
 
HATH SAID IN HIS HEART— 107 
 
 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 command 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 delusions. 
 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 ap- 
 parent 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 
 traditions from your own that they accept your 
 rule, and even come to feel conscious attach- 
 ment 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 
 
108 THE PRUSSIAN 
 
 that one the mysterious race which no Empire 
 has been able to absorb — the Jews. The 
 Spaniards did it in South America. We have 
 done it, at least to an extent, in India. The 
 striking example of its success is Alsace, where 
 scarcely more than two centuries ago — only 
 about a century ago as regards Mulhouse — the 
 French took over the rule of a German-speak- 
 ing 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 can- 
 not 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 convulsion and suppressed civil 
 war. All sensible Englishmen regard our mis- 
 management of Ireland as the worst blot on our 
 
HATH SAID IN HIS HEART— 109 
 
 record for statesmanship and humanity. Well, 
 the Prussian possessions are all Irelands, 
 eighteenth-century Irelands, Irelands of the 
 days of the pitch-cap and the Penal Laws. 
 It is not a question of religion or of race. The 
 Lutheran Danes of Schleswig and 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 
 appreciation of the main factors in the 
 European situation, the military temper of the 
 French, the elements of weakness in the Haps- 
 burg Empire, the immense resources of Russia 
 and her invulnerability to invasion, the naval 
 strength and colonial policy of England. But 
 he had no comprehension 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 own life's work. 
 
 He first blundered into a quarrel with the 
 
110 THE PRUSSIAN 
 
 Catholic Church, then enjoying one of her 
 periodical resurrections of vitality. It is 
 curious to contrast the skill which Bismarck 
 showed in dealing with teniporal powers with 
 his utter inability to understand the nature of 
 the power with which he had now to deal. 
 There was in him nothing of that wisdom which 
 made Napoleon 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 professors for a great schism. 
 He thought that the "Old Catholic" move- 
 ment, the utter insignificance and early fizzling 
 out of which only emphasized 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 Kultur- 
 kampf and the Falk Laws nearly split the 
 Empire at its inception. Bismarck only saved 
 it by an abject and ignominious surrender, by 
 
HATH SAID IN HIS HEART— 111 
 
 accepting humbly the terms dictated by the 
 ecclesiastical authority. The policy which was 
 to have made an end for ever of the clerical 
 power in Germany resulted in the establishment 
 of clericalism in its least desirable sense more 
 firmly in the Catholic provinces 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 humilia- 
 tion, did Bismarck keep Bavaria and the Rhine 
 Provinces. But in Prussian Poland, where 
 there was a national and racial as well as 
 a religious quarrel, the old futile weapons of 
 coercion were refurbished and applied with a 
 new ruthlessness. It was resolved to deprive 
 the Poles of their land, and a "Colonization 
 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 con- 
 spiracy was met by a counter conspiracy of the 
 type with which Ireland has made us familiar. 
 The Poles, in accordance with Parnell's famous 
 advice, "kept a firm grip on their farms and 
 homesteads"; and Bismarck's policy utterly 
 
112 THE PRUSSIAN 
 
 failed to accomplish its end. The most it did 
 was to scatter a part of the Polish population 
 over the surface of the Prussian Empire, where 
 every Polish family formed a nucleus of dis- 
 affection and a source of peril. An attempt to 
 suppress the Polish language, though carried 
 out with infamous 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 
 variations in Schleswig, in Alsace and in Lor- 
 raine. And in all these conquered provinces 
 the Prussian rule became more abominable and 
 more unsuccessful as the minds of the Prussian 
 ruling class became increasingly subject to that 
 disease or perversion which it is my business 
 in this chapter to attempt 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 constant and ritual self-praise, and it is 
 probable that in the beginning this habit was 
 deliberately encouraged by cynical rulers, who 
 
HATH SAID IN HIS HEART— 113 
 
 were under no illusion themselves. Nay, even 
 down to the outbreak of the present war, it is 
 probable that the rulers of Prussia, who were 
 necessarily better acquainted with the facts 
 than they allowed their subjects to be, were 
 proportionately less under the influence of mere 
 bounce and swagger than they. Their idea 
 was that this sort of bounce and swagger, if 
 thoroughly impressed on the public mind, 
 strengthens a nation, 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 them- 
 selves. 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 account 
 of evidence, even of the evidence of the senses. 
 It makes the sufferer altogether incapable of 
 facing facts or of dealing with men. The in- 
 fection spreads to the rulers themselves. They 
 are given over to strong delusion that they may 
 believe a lie. The astounding blunders of this 
 
114 THE PRUSSIAN 
 
 year which have hurried Prussia to her final 
 ruin, represent the vengeance which truth takes 
 upon her enemies, and the just punishment of 
 the cynicism whereby the former generations of 
 Prussian statesmen thought to secure them- 
 selves by practising on the credulity of man- 
 kind. 
 
 Another hurt that her delusion did to Prussia 
 was to snap utterly that subtle but indispensable 
 bond between man and man which we call 
 " 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 
 recognition 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 theni. In both connections 
 the Prussian has simply forgotten what the 
 thing means. 
 
 Take any of the most dubious and debatable 
 
HATH SAID IN HIS HEART— 115 
 
 institutions with which the idea of honour has 
 connected itself. Take the duel. When an 
 English 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 super- 
 humanity to show that he cannot be hurt or 
 killed; for if he really could not be hurt or 
 killed the whole business would become a dis- 
 gusting and dastardly murder and would be 
 recognized at once as such by the most dis- 
 solute bravo that ever provoked quarrels to 
 show off his courage. 
 
 But when the Prussian officer swaggers along 
 Unter den Linden or the Kaiserstrasse elbow- 
 ing women and civilians off the pavements, he 
 is not provoking quarrels to show his courage ; 
 he is provoking quarrels to show what he would 
 perhaps call his supremacy, what I should call 
 his immunity, which is much the same thing as 
 saying his cowardice. Take this historic and 
 well-authenticated case. A Prussian officer 
 insults a young lady at a ball. Her betrothed 
 
116 THE PRUSSIAN 
 
 very properly strikes him. Thereupon he 
 draws his sabre and cuts his unarmed assailant 
 down. His conduct 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 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, children, perhaps 
 cats ! 
 
 A Prussian officer at Saverne in Alsace, 
 having 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 
 
HATH SAID IN HIS HEART— 117 
 
 lamentable loss of self-control on the part of 
 an officer and an ever more lamentable lack of 
 impartiality on the part of other officers. The 
 original outrage might be due onljr to blind, 
 ungovernable fury. The subsequent acquittal 
 might be due only to blind professional esprit 
 de corps. But this officer was not merely 
 acquitted. He was hailed as an 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 imperial personage, when mili- 
 tary exigencies compel 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 there 
 is nothing specially humanitarian about my 
 criticism. I do not blame the Prussian officer 
 for fighting and killing. I blame him for kill- 
 ing 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 signalled him out for admiration and 
 applause, would be much the same. He had, 
 
118 THE PRUSSIAN 
 
 at the very best, abandoned the most honour- 
 able of all professions, that of a soldier, for 
 the basest of all trades, that of an executioner; 
 and his brother officers 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," intended for those who are to obey, 
 corrupts it no less. It is of the essence of a 
 soldier that he should obey, obey unhesitat- 
 ingly, without questioning or after-thought. 
 But it is also of his 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 the essence, of 
 the Prussian conception of soldiering that fear 
 and fear alone should be the weapon used. 
 The soldier is to be cowed into an unnatural 
 courage, as men very wretched and broken- 
 
HATH SAID IN HIS HEART— 119 
 
 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 unintelligent they will even, if they 
 can be kept together, face losses from which 
 the bravest free soldiers would shrink. But 
 even from the purely military point of view you 
 will note disadvantages. 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 matter of fact, all 
 these inferiorities, though partly compensated 
 for by a carefully perfected organization, may 
 be discovered in the German forces as com- 
 pared with their opponents. Of the loss of 
 honour and of the dignity of the soul I do not 
 
120 THE PRUSSIAN 
 
 speak, for the Prussian does not recognize it 
 as a drawback. But it counts for something in 
 the long run. 
 
 Finally, there is another inevitable conse- 
 quence 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 forgotten. 
 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 recognized cultus, supported by a profes- 
 sorial crusade. It is from Berlin that there 
 proceeds that stream of ludicrous and nauseat- 
 ing " scientific " 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 occasion- 
 ally make their appearance in England, they 
 appear somewhat secretively. Their promin- 
 ence or wide sale would excite universal anger 
 and disgust. It would probably produce riots. 
 
HATH SAID IN HIS HEART— 121 
 
 Mr. Edward Carpenter, one of the very few 
 misguided imitators of the German professors 
 in this country (his little book is full of quota- 
 tions from Ulrichs, Krafft-Ebing, Moll, Hirsch- 
 feld and the rest) remarks on the "neglect" 
 of the propaganda here as compared with its 
 popularity in Germany. In Germany, or at 
 any rate in Prussia, professors holding and 
 continuing to hold high public and academic 
 posts, men patronized and honoured by the 
 State, vie with each other in eulogizing and 
 apologizing for the infamy. One of these 
 drivelling degenerates, a certain Dr. Moll, 
 Professor of Psychology at Berlin, who, as I 
 gather from Mr. Edward Carpenter's book, has 
 received a sort of vote of thanks from the per- 
 verts of Berlin — that numerous and presumably 
 influential body — seems to have been selected 
 by the Prussian Government to report upon 
 " the psychology of the Berlin people ! " 
 
 Such brainless nastiness may, for the pur- 
 poses of this book, be left out of account. But 
 it is impossible to leave out of account the other 
 kind of perversion — the perversion of cruelty. 
 
 Man is so made that you cannot twist his 
 moral instincts without bruising and warping 
 
122 THE PRUSSIAN 
 
 them, without producing something in the soul 
 analogous to mortification in an injured limb. 
 The Prussian rulers deliberately taught their 
 subjects to disregard obligations, the recogni- 
 tion 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 disease 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 
 indeed 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 man could be trained to 
 be cruel when they were told and kind when 
 they were told. The effect was, of course, that 
 
HATH SAID IN HIS HEART— 123 
 
 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 atrocities 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 will 
 afford innumerable examples of this kind of 
 insanity. 
 
 Thus were the vices of Prussia deliberately 
 encouraged by her rulers, weakening her from 
 year to year. And that weakening arose ulti- 
 mately from the fact that the creed on which 
 Prussia was founded was false. Able as Fred- 
 erick the Great was, he had miscalculated. His 
 
124 THE PRUSSIAN HATH SAID— 
 
 system was doomed to fail at last, because the 
 world and the nature of men are not what he 
 thought them ; because the instinct which leads 
 the basest to prefer good to evil is a vital one 
 which cannot be eradicated, and the perversion 
 of which is suicide; because, after all, Satan 
 is only Prince not King of this World, because 
 there is a Judge that judgeth the earth. 
 
CHAPTER V 
 
 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 German 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 deliberately 
 encouraged France to found a colonial empire 
 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 
 
 125 
 
126 THE PRUSSIAN 
 
 have been that England, situated as she was, 
 ought to avoid war 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 respon- 
 sible for the ultimately disastrous cession of 
 Heligoland, might still have appeared wise and 
 prudent if that power had not shortly after- 
 wards begun to develop colonial ambitions of 
 the most arrogant type and to entertain the 
 definite design of challenging British naval 
 supremacy. 
 
 In the main this development must be attri- 
 buted to the megalomania which we have noted 
 in Prussia as the chief result of deliberately 
 encouraged illusion. We in this country feel a 
 natural enthusiasm for our colonies, an en- 
 thusiasm which depends less upon the idea thai 
 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 settle- 
 
HATH SAID IN HIS HEART— 127 
 
 merits in uncivilized 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 aptitude, as the Italians 
 have a right to be proud of their painting and 
 the Germans of their music. Also it fitted in 
 well with out 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 
 essentially 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 colonization, and cer- 
 tainly they had no natural taste for adventure. 
 They have never dreamed of going to any 
 colony that was not already thoroughly estab- 
 lished and settled by somebody else. Never- 
 theless, 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 
 
128 THE PRUSSIAN 
 
 conclusion that a war with this country was 
 desirable, he would doubtless have engineered 
 it with his customary skill. The course was 
 not very difficult. 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 conflict with those of the 
 German Empire. Opportunity would have 
 been taken to increase and emphasize every 
 possible cause of quarrel — and at the time 
 there were many — between Russia and Great 
 Britain. When the benevolent neutrality of 
 Russia 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 
 difficulties in those days, and some of them 
 might easily 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 legacy. But by the time that 
 British and German interests began to conflict 
 the memory of 1870 was already dim ; a genera- 
 tion had grown up that had no personal memory 
 of the violation of the national territory. As 
 
HATH SAID IN HIS HEART— 129 
 
 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 keeping 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 return for some 
 trifling colonial concession. That would have 
 gone far to placate the French — say, at the time 
 of the Fashoda incident. With a little manage- 
 ment 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 business 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 
 
130 THE PRUSSIAN 
 
 nation after nation until Prussia alone was left 
 erect. • 
 
 It should be observed that about ten years 
 before the present war broke out two events 
 occurred which rather tended to confirm the 
 Prussians in their delusion. First, in 1904 
 Russia, a power which Bismarck had always 
 sought to conciliate and of which even his 
 successors had always stood in some awe, was 
 decisively defeated by Japan. This disaster, 
 which among other things brought into promi- 
 nence the defects of the Russian military 
 system, was followed by an insurrectionary 
 movement in Russia itself. The Hohenzol- 
 lerns, in accordance with their traditional 
 policy, lent their support to the Tsar's Govern- 
 ment in resisting that movement which, after 
 a fierce struggle, collapsed, mainly, perhaps, 
 owing to its gradual divorce from the national, 
 and especially from the religious, instincts of 
 the populace. But the Japanese War and the 
 abortive Revolution tended to make the Prus- 
 sian rulers believe that the effective power of 
 Russia had been overrated; that she need not 
 be feared. 
 
 The next year, 1905, a deliberate and pro- 
 
HATH SAID IN HIS HEART— 131 
 
 vocative challenge offered by Germany to 
 France found the latter unprepared ; the resig- 
 nation of M. Delcasse 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 fol- 
 lowed by an even more decided check to Russia. 
 This arose out of the affair of the " Young 
 Turk" Revolution, when a small group of 
 intriguers organized 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 a Turk always rules, 
 but had preserved the independence and pres- 
 tige of the Ottoman Empire 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. Austria 
 seized the opportunity to annex formally two 
 provinces of the Turkish Empire, Bosnia and 
 
132 THE PRUSSIAN 
 
 Herzegovina, which they had been occupying 
 under 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 con- 
 vulsions which followed it. Her mobilization 
 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 being continually augmented, not as Bis- 
 marck would have augmented it, steadily and 
 quietly, but to the accompaniment of a con- 
 tinual flourish of trumpets and of loud (if 
 unofficial) threats against this country. Thus 
 was Great Britain forced to change her tradi- 
 tional policy and throw in her lot with France 
 and Russia. No one who has comprehended 
 
HATH SAID IN HIS HEART— 133 
 
 the real character and aims of Prussia, and who 
 values either the national self-respect of Eng- 
 land 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 pro- 
 vocatively 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 
 Morocco, 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. The amazing story 
 told by the ex-spy "Armgaard Karl Graves" 
 may be only a string of lies, but the picture he 
 gives of the Prussian attitude is certainly 
 not far from the truth. 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 
 
134 THE PRUSSIAN 
 
 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, and 
 we have had a good reason during the present 
 war to be thankful that it was not available 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 im- 
 portant to wipe it out as soon as circumstances 
 more favourable to Germany arose. 
 
 The second event was the outbreak and suc- 
 cessful prosecution of the Balkan Wars. Here 
 a policy hostile to that pursued by Prussia, a 
 policy which had for its aim the destruction of 
 Turkish rule in the European provinces of the 
 Qttoman Empire, appealed to arms and won. 
 The Germanic Powers could not prevent it 
 
HATH SAID IN HIS HEART— 135 
 
 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-important strategic position of Valona. 
 Nevertheless — 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 Germanic Powers, whose ally and 
 dependant Turkey had been. It was also a 
 special blow to Prussian military prestige; for 
 the training of the Turkish army was Prussian. 
 
 I mention these four incidents in order be- 
 cause they help us to understand the state of 
 mind of the Prussian rulers, and the under- 
 standing of that state of mind is the key to 
 the whole mystery of the present war and its 
 origin. 
 
 Let us suppose a man whose main ambition 
 is to establish his superiority in wealth over 
 another man. Let us imagine him caught by 
 accident without his cheque-book and com- 
 pelled to borrow a sovereign in the presence of 
 his rival. What will he do? If he is a man 
 with anything of the Prussian in him h? will 
 
136 THE PRUSSIAN 
 
 seize the next opportunity of displaying his 
 wealth in the most ostentatious fashion, or he 
 will make on the other man some sudden claim 
 which will demonstrate his comparativepoverty. 
 
 Just such was the situation of the Imperial 
 Government, 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 Prussian rulers, certainly the Prussian 
 people, believed it themselves. Moreover two 
 of the incidents referred to, the dismissal of 
 M. Delcasse and the abandonment of Bosnia, 
 had seemed to justify the belief. But then it 
 was overclouded. Germany had the appear- 
 ance of having retreated from Agadir under 
 Franco-British pressure, and of having been 
 compelled to permit a rearrangement of the 
 Balkan States unfavourable both to her in- 
 terests 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 dis- 
 solved, and each of its separate members forced 
 to choose between a public humiliation and a 
 war without allies. The second alternative was 
 
HATH SAID IN HIS HEART— 137 
 
 desired by Prussia : for the first, she was, if 
 necessary, prepared. 
 
 I emphasize this point, because those who 
 are disposed to disbelieve, in spite of the un- 
 answerable evidence of public documents, in 
 the full responsibility 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 crush- 
 ing or humiliation of France and finally for 
 a successful attack on this country. 
 
 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 Austria as if she were a nation. 
 Austria is simply the Hapsburgs, and the Haps- 
 burgs are simply a dynasty. The various 
 
138 THE PRUSSIAN 
 
 dominions which acknowledge 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 Empire 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 diplo- 
 macy and statecraft, relying on the playing 
 off of one people against another, and on 
 the maintenance of a careful balance among 
 rival powers. From the time of Kaunitz on- 
 wards 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 die 
 Austrian Empire on the basis of the one thing 
 common 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 the profitable 
 office which Masonic sectarianism h^d lost to 
 
HATH SAID IN HIS HEART— 139 
 
 France, that of protector of Catholic interests in 
 the Near East, and would thus become a formi- 
 dable counterpoise to Russia, the traditional 
 protector of the Orthodox Church. But in 
 order that this policy mig-ht 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 — German and 
 Magyar — ^which practically ruled the dual 
 empire. These privileges Francis Ferdinand 
 set himself to curtail, and of that spirit he was 
 the known and avowed enemy. 
 
 On June 28, 19 14, 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 
 Austrian Government professes to have proofs 
 that it was hatched in Belgrade, and that Ser- 
 bian officers 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 distasteful to the Orthodox Slavs of 
 
140 THE PRUSSIAN 
 
 Serbia and to their brothers within the Austrian 
 Empire as well as to the Orthodox Government 
 of Russia. On the other hand it is certain that 
 they were at least equally offensive to German 
 and Magyar officialdom at Vienna and Buda- 
 Pesth — nay, to the old Emperor himself, and 
 still more to his ally at Berlin. There are 
 some queer features about the story that sug- 
 gest 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 Austrian 
 subject), but on making inquiries 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 
 possible to the enemy, let us assume that the 
 Austrian Government did hold in its hand proof 
 of Serbian complicity in the plot. 
 
HATH SAID IN HIS HEART— 141 
 
 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 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 published it or, perhaps 
 more probably, he would have communicated 
 it privately to the Serbian Government with a 
 threat that it would be published if certain con- 
 cessions were not made. How hard and 
 humiliating and even unjust he might have 
 made the terms of Serbia's submission without 
 provoking war may be seen by the extent to 
 which Serbia was forced by Russia to accept 
 the Austrian demands, monstrous as they were. 
 Francis Ferdinand would have counted on this, 
 and probably scored a great increase of pres- 
 tige for Austria at the expense of both Serbia 
 and Russia. But war he would at all costs 
 have avoided, for from that the Hapsburgs 
 had nothing to gain and everything to lose. 
 
142 THE PRUSSIAN 
 
 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 military prowess of her arms. More- 
 over a war with Serbia was almost bound to 
 mean a war with Russia, and Russia could in- 
 dubitably crush Austria with one hand. If 
 Austria were saved from such a fate, it could 
 only be by the intervention of Prussia, and if 
 such intervention 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 Hohenzollerns, 
 who would become the real masters of the 
 Empire as well as the reversionaries of its 
 German provinces. 
 
 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 
 advised Francis Joseph to throw away every 
 diplomatic advantage in order to make peace 
 impossible and war an immediate certainty. 
 Yet that is what he unquestionably did. The 
 whole interest of the negotiations in their first 
 
HATH SAID IN HIS HEART— 143 
 
 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 28. For nearly a month Austria did 
 nothing. She said nothing to her antagonist 
 Serbia, nothing to her own ally Italy. Neither 
 the Russian nor the British Government could 
 obtain any information as to her intentions. 
 All that was known during that month of silence 
 was that Austria was replenishing her stocks 
 of ammunition. We shall see, however, that 
 the German Government was throughout this 
 time in close and confidential communication 
 with its ally. 
 
 On July 22 the Serbian Government received 
 its first communication from Vienna. It took 
 the form of an ultimatum. A categorically 
 satisfactory answer was to reach the Austrian 
 Government 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 
 
144 THE PRUSSIAN 
 
 framed it were clearly afraid above all things 
 of its acceptance, and were always on the guard 
 against this dangerous possibility. Wherever 
 a demand might conceivably, though not with- 
 out cruel mortification, be complied with, some- 
 thing is added calculated to make compliance 
 out of the question. Thus the Serbian Govern- 
 ment 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 guilt being produced) to having 
 in violation of solemn pledges encouraged such 
 propaganda in the past. The Serbian Govern- 
 ment is further asked to do things which (as 
 must have been perfectly well known both in 
 Vienna and in Berlin) it was not constitution- 
 ally competent to do — as, for instance, to sup- 
 press and confiscate newspapers. It was asked 
 to do things which no Government is physically 
 capable of doing — to control the secret pro- 
 ceedings of unnamed persons. Finally, three 
 demands were made which I set out verbatim. 
 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 
 
HATH SAID IN HIS HEART— 145 
 
 to the Hapsburg Empire than would their 
 acceptance. 
 
 " To remove from the military service, and 
 from the administration in general, all officers 
 and functionaries guilty of propaganda against 
 the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy whose names 
 and deeds the Austro-Hungarian Government 
 reserve to themselves the right of communicat- 
 ing to the Royal Government. 
 
 "To accept the collaboration in Serbia 
 of representatives of the Austro-Hungarian 
 Government for the suppression of the sub- 
 versive movement directed against the terri- 
 torial integrity of the Monarchy. 
 
 " To take judicial proceedings against acces- 
 sories to the plot of June 28 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 
 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 
 
146 THE PRUSSIAN 
 
 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 sub- 
 sequent 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 religious quarrels of Greek and Latin. 
 She had only a secondary interest in the main- 
 tenance of the Austrian Empire; indeed she 
 probably hoped ultimately to acquire a large 
 accession of territory on the dissolution of that 
 Empire. But she had a very direct interest in 
 
HATH SAID IN HIS HEART— 147 
 
 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 
 declared among the artisans 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 international 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 attacked, Russia 
 would have to fight or lose her whole influence 
 in the Balkans and confess herself a defeated 
 and humbled power. 
 
 I have said that the Prussians, with the 
 
148 THE PRUSSIAN 
 
 Russo-Japanese War in their minds, almost 
 certainly underrated the military effectiveness 
 of Russia. At any rate, they felt confident that 
 they and their Austrian allies could easily beat 
 Russia if Russia was fighting single-handed. 
 But would Russia 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 19 14 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 Russian 
 alliance, had received a great accession of 
 strength. An attempt to form a Coalition 
 Government leaning partly on the Right had 
 failed, and the Premiership had been entrusted 
 to M. Viviani, an ex-Socialist and a sometime 
 opponent of those military measures, notably 
 the Three Years' Service Law, by which France 
 sought to secure herself from Prussian aggres- 
 sion. From the new Government not only the 
 
HATH SAID IN HIS HEART— 149 
 
 Conservatives but those Radicals who, like 
 M. Briand and M. Millerand, had taken up a 
 strongly national attitude, were excluded. M. 
 Jaures, the Socialist leader, though not a mem- 
 ber 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 Herve as an ally : it is said that they 
 counted on a rising in half-a-dozen French 
 industrial towns at the instant of mobilization. 
 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, 
 and that up to the last moment, the neutrality 
 of England. England had been involved by 
 the professional sham-fighting of her politicians 
 in a trouble which at the moment looked serious. 
 The agreement between the Front Benches that 
 Home Rule must be granted to Ireland had 
 not been accompanied by any satisfactory 
 settlement of the small but very real problem 
 of the population of the north-east corner of that 
 
150 THE PRUSSIAN 
 
 island whose national and still more whose 
 religious sentiments were hostile to government 
 from Dublin. Round 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 arm, 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 
 received, 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 our 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 authorities clearly 
 believed that we were certain to remain neu- 
 tral, and one may surmise that they hoped 
 
HATH SAID IN HIS HEART— 151 
 
 that our refusal might influence the conduct of 
 France. 
 
 To return to the Prussian plan. Russia, if 
 deserted by her allies, must either fight single- 
 handed or surrender. Which ever she did, the 
 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 intervention. The Franco-British 
 combination would again be " tested " — it was 
 hoped with more satisfactory 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 
 
152 THE PRUSSIAN 
 
 Prussia of bombast and self-delusion, the 
 Prussia of the decadence. And I say that its 
 adoption by the rulers of the German Empire 
 is the one hypothesis 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 
 not only in the British official account {Great 
 Britain and the European Crisis. Wyman & 
 Sons, id), but in the German Government's 
 own white paper which, along with much special 
 pleading, contains some very interesting in- 
 formation which was necessarily unknown to 
 our Foreign Office. I take my quotations from 
 the translation given in a supplement of the 
 New York Times, dated August 24. The 
 paper itself bears the date of August 3. 
 
 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 opera- 
 tions on the other side of the border without 
 
HATH SAID IN HIS HEART— 158 
 
 taking action. The Austro-Hungarian Govern- 
 ment 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 
 monarchy 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, recogniz- 
 ing the vital interest of Austria-Hungary which 
 were at stake, we could neither advise our ally 
 to a compliance that would have been 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 endeavour 
 to show presently. 
 
 But at least the pretence that Berlin en- 
 deavoured to influence Vienna in a pacific 
 direction which did much duty in the days 
 immediately preceding the war, especially while 
 the neutrality of England" was still hoped for, 
 
154 THE PRUSSIAN 
 
 is thrown overboard. The German Govern- 
 ment consented to "transmit suggestions of 
 various kinds for the maintenance of peace" 
 from Sir Edward Grey to Vienna, but she does 
 not now pretend that she advised the accept- 
 ance 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 tran- 
 scribe it — 
 
 " From the very beginning of the conflict we 
 took the stand that this was an affair of Austria 
 which she alone would have to bring to a deci- 
 sion with Serbia. We have therefore devoted 
 our entire efforts to localizing the war and to 
 convincing the other Powers that Austria-Hun- 
 gary was compelled to take justified defensive 
 methods and appeal to arms. We took the 
 stand emphatically that no civilized nation had 
 the right in this struggle against lack of culture 
 (Unkultur) and criminal political morality to 
 prevent Austria from acting, and to take away 
 the just punishment from Serbia. We in- 
 structed our representatives abroad in that 
 sense." 
 
 So far so good. We knew all about Prussian 
 
HATH SAID IN HIS HEART— 155 
 
 " culture " — and Prussian " political morality " 
 already. But now we come to a new develop- 
 ment which throws a flood of light upon all that 
 had happened before. 
 
 Austria had declared war on Serbia on 
 July 28. But in the last three days of the 
 month she suddenly began to show herself 
 much more reasonable. She consented to a 
 proposal for direct negotiations with Russia, 
 and these negotiations were proceeding so satis- 
 factorily that peace seemed almost assured. 
 Says Sir Maurice de Bunsen in bis last 
 despatch from Vienna : " M. Schebeko [the 
 Russian Anibassador] to the end was working 
 hard for peace. He was holding the most con- 
 ciliatory 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 spirit." Then suddenly, when peace was 
 already in full sight, came war. I again quote 
 Sir Maurice de Bunsen — 
 
 " Unfortunately these conversations at St. 
 Petersburg and Vienna were cut short by the 
 transfer of the dispute to the more dangerous 
 ground of a direct conflict between Germany 
 
156 THE PRUSSIAN 
 
 and Russia. Germany intervened on July 31 
 by means of her double ultimatums to St. 
 Petersburg and Paris. The ultimatums were 
 of a kind to which only one answer is possible, 
 and Germany declared war on Russia on 
 August I and on France on August 3. 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 
 Government forced war not only on her enemies 
 but on her unfortunate ally. The pretence 
 that the alleged Russian and French mobiliza- 
 tion 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 mobilized she only acted with 
 the commonest prudence. Her mobilization 
 was notoriously a slo'v^er business than that of 
 her enemies, one of whom was already fully 
 mobilized. She could hardly be expected to 
 forget how Prussia, by massing troops on 
 her undefended frontiers, had compelled her 
 to a humiliating surrender over Bosnia : she 
 was not likely to be caught napping a second 
 time. 
 
HATH SAID IN HIS HEART— 157 
 
 The real meaning of the, whole! story is made 
 clear by the sudden hesitation of Vienna to 
 proceed to extremities (Austria did not, in fact, 
 declare 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 outrageously provocative policy 
 in the matter of Serbia at the direct instigation 
 of Berlin, 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 obvious 
 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 communi- 
 cations with Russia. What exactly passed 
 between the allies we cannot tell; it is signifi- 
 cant 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 diplo- 
 matic success for the Triple Entente. Rather 
 
158 THE PRUSSIAN 
 
 than face such a possibility she would herself 
 precipitate war and drag her duped and help- 
 less ally along with her. If the reader will 
 turn back to the description I have given of 
 the Ems affair and of how Bismarck made war 
 inevitable in 1870 — or better still, read Bis- 
 marck's own account of these transactions — he 
 will see how little the political morality of 
 Prussian statesmen has changed in the interval, 
 however much their intelligence 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 aggres- 
 sion. Before war was declared, Jean Jaures, 
 on whom they had counted to oppose French 
 intervention, made a speech to an international 
 gathering of Socialists at Brussels, in which he 
 denounced in unmeasured 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 
 
HATH SAID IN HIS HEART— 159 
 
 of Germany cannot yet be said with any con- 
 fidence. But more startling phenomena were 
 to follow the actual outbreak of the war. The 
 Confederation Generate de Travail, which had 
 been expected to oblige Berlin by getting up 
 a revolution in the Kaiser's interest, issued 
 instead a manifesto appealing to all its mem- 
 bers to rally to the national defence; and 
 Gustav Herve, 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 German Chancellor, that Prussia counted 
 absolutely on the inaction of this country. 
 That she should have so counted, seeing that 
 the reduction of this country to vassalage 
 was the real objective of her complex policy, 
 seems extraordinary. But, apart from the 
 exaggerated importance 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 
 
160 THE PRUSSIAN 
 
 Edward 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 Foreign 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 Russia, it is not altogether unlikely 
 that Berlin might have paused and allowed 
 Austria to extricate herself, as she was anxious 
 to do, from an untenable position. But Sir 
 Edward Grey persistently refused to make such 
 a declaration, and Berlin drew the natural- 
 inference. 
 
 Nor was it in Berlin only that that inference 
 was drawn. Many Englishmen shared the im- 
 pression. Many of us will not easily forget 
 the black week which preceded the actual 
 declaration of war, when we half feared that 
 we were going to see England lose her honour 
 and wondered vaguely whether an 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 arrayed on 
 
HATH SAID IN HIS HEART— 161 
 
 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 in- 
 telligible objection to paying taxes. Worse, 
 there were Germans and German Jews among 
 them, men powerful in the City and all-powerful 
 at Westminster. Their influence was soon felt. 
 EverjTwhere 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 here by a last brutal 
 and cynical violation of international honour, 
 which was also a 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 
 aggression. 
 
 All the same, I doubt — and I think from a 
 remark he made to the German Ambassador, 
 that Sir Edward Grey himself doubted — 
 whether anything less flagrant than the Belgian 
 
 M 
 
162 THE PRUSSIAN 
 
 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 
 towards its neighbours had always been scrupu- 
 lously correct, and whose neutrality had more 
 than once been solemnly guaranteed by all 
 the Powers, including Prussia and England. 
 Prussia, alleging no wrong, proposed to violate 
 that neutrality because it would be conveni- 
 ent to attack 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 promise to France. 
 Failing that, Prussia would break her promise 
 to Belgium and invite England to facilitate the 
 breach by breaking hers. In exchange 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. 
 
HATH SAID IN HIS HEART— 163 
 
 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, sometimes does them a real injustice. 
 Only those who know how deeply corruption 
 had bitten into the public life of England will 
 be able to understand 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 honour was utterly dead. 
 They had taken the filthy money of base 
 usurers, many of whom were not even English- 
 men. They had received these men in their 
 houses. They had sold them titles for them- 
 selves and places on the Front Benches for 
 their relations and dependants. They had con- 
 nived at every profitable ramp, and hushed 
 up every unspeakable 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 
 
164 THE PRUSSIAN HATH SAID— 
 
 came when the plutocrats, at the conclusion of 
 their long tale of dishonouring bargains, asked 
 for the honour of England to be thrown in 
 as a make-weight against their money — and 
 their demand was refused. 
 
CHAPTER VI 
 
 THE BARBARIANS 
 
 On August 3 this year bodies of soldiers in 
 blue-grey uniforms began to cross the narrow 
 river which marks the frontier between the 
 German 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 masterpieces 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 these great masses of moving men 
 that recalled a memory. So fifteen centuries 
 before companies of half-civilized mercenaries 
 
 165 
 
166 THE PRUSSIAN 
 
 from the marches of the Empire, and masses 
 of savage raiders from beyond its borders, may 
 have passed that same stream and seen before 
 them the security 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 pre- 
 vent a thrill of recollection running through 
 civilized Europe which had seen the thing 
 before. They were the Barbarians. And they 
 were returning. 
 
 They approached the first of the great for- 
 tresses which blocked their path. It was Liege. 
 They demanded its surrender. The thunder 
 of its guns answered them. It was the answer 
 of civilization. Tiny Belgium, standing at the 
 moment alone in the face of that immense 
 aggression, felt her kinship with Europe 
 answered for Europe, and placed Europe for 
 ever 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 under- 
 standing of what Prussia is and why she must 
 
HATH SAID IN HIS HEART— 167 
 
 be destroyed. There are no words that an 
 Englishman can find in which to speak of 
 Belgium and 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 aspect 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 
 features appear : a contempt of morals and 
 a contempt 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 outrages incidental to war since war is 
 itself an outrage. Now war certainly involves 
 the deliberate 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 
 
168 THE PRUSSIAN 
 
 Materialist, you must not assume that all men 
 accept your first principles as self-evident; and 
 you must recognize that a doctrine which would 
 condemn war has certainly never been part of 
 the Christian cr^ed, any more than a doctrine 
 which would justify outrages on non-combat- 
 ants has been part of the creed of the European 
 warrior. 
 
 War, as Christendom has always recognized 
 it as allowable, is an affair conducted under 
 certain strict ruks. 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 necessary to the practice 
 of any high virtue — the conception of honour. 
 The essence of that conception 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 observ- 
 ing them. Now the essence of the Prussian 
 theory is the denial of reciprocity. The Prus- 
 sian, 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 
 
HATH SAID IN HIS HEART— 169 
 
 did Frederick the Great, on the advantage 
 which he will derive from other men being 
 hampered 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 
 Belgium and in Northern France has been 
 conducted by the Prussian military authorities 
 with a savage cruelty altogether inconsistent 
 with the traditions of civilized warfare. I am 
 not at all concerned to deny that in this con- 
 nection there has been exaggeration and false- 
 hood. 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 deliberate falsehood and 
 fraud (as often as not devised by the enemy 
 for the purposie of discrediting the real case 
 against the Prussian system) have had their 
 share in many of the stories which are current 
 here. 
 
 But this does not touch the indisputable 
 minimum contained, for instance, in the official 
 Belgian report, drawn up under the super- 
 vision of men of unquestionable judgment 
 
170 THE PRUSSIAN 
 
 and integrity, including the Chief Justice of 
 Belgium. Nor does it touch the stories of 
 eye-witnesses, including some of our own 
 soldiers as well as those who have actually 
 taken in mutilated Belgian children, which we 
 have all heard personally. Finally, it does not 
 and cannot touch the official admissions of the 
 Prussian Government itself. 
 
 For that Government, at least until it was 
 scared into some measure of hypocrisy by the 
 disgust 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 
 comment in detail. Let the following pro- 
 clamation, admittedly issued by the military 
 authorities during their brief stay in Rheims, 
 speak for itself-^— 
 
 " 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, 
 
HATH SAID IN HIS HEART— 171 
 
 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 German Army. 
 These hostaiges will be hanged at the slightest 
 attempt at disorder. Also the town will be 
 totally or partly burnt and the inhabitants will 
 be hanged for any infraction of the above. 
 " By Order of the German Authorities." 
 
 Then follow the names of eighty-one inhabit- 
 ants of Rheims, including four priests. 
 
 This atrocious document proves conclu- 
 sively, if any proof were wanted, that the 
 atrocities committed by the German armies are 
 not the ordinary excesses or reprisals of sol- 
 diers, but are part of the deliberate policy of 
 the Prussian authorities. It is unnecessary to 
 emphasize the monstrous violation not only of 
 
172 THE PRUSSIAN 
 
 justice and humanity, but of international law 
 involved in the Rheims proclamation. It may 
 be doubted, indeed, whether the healthy con- 
 science of Europe really acquiesces in the Prus- 
 sian 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 franc-tireur ; but 
 the franc-tireur 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 was even suggested, if certain other 
 people, over whom, being prisoners in the 
 hands of the enemy, they could not possibly 
 exercise the smallest control, resisted 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. 
 
HATH SAID IN HIS HEART— 173 
 
 The Prussian theory and practice is quite 
 simple and logical. Morals being as inapplic- 
 able to war as to diplomacy, no considerations 
 should enter into the conduct of a war except 
 a calculation of the material factors likely to 
 promote success. Now in the present war it 
 was of the essence of the Prussian plan of 
 campaign to strike an instant and overwhelm- 
 ing blow at France. The resistance of Belgium 
 was an obstacle. To overcome that obstacle 
 by the thorough military conquest and occupa- 
 tion of Belgium meant delay, 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 occupa- 
 tion, but by a reign of terror sufficiently savage 
 to cow its inhabitants into submission. 
 
 I am not saying for a moment that, even 
 from an unmoral point of view, such a policy 
 is wise. I believe, on the contrary, that, like 
 all the developments of the modern Prussian 
 mind, it is tainted with a kind of madness which 
 is the nemesis of a divorce from instinctive 
 morals. And I also think that it involves a 
 complete misunderstanding of the way in which 
 the Christian conscience works in Europeans. 
 
174 THE PRUSSIAN 
 
 The Prussian, with his " Master Morality " and 
 " Slave Morality," 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 carried 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 realize 
 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 inclined to say that enough had been 
 done for honour, and that further resistance 
 could not reasonably be expected of them. As 
 it is there is no Belgian — and for the matter of 
 that no Englishman or Frenchman — ^who has 
 not had the horrors of the Prussian occupation 
 — the slaughtered non-combatants, the dese- 
 crated churches, the outraged women and the 
 mutilated children — branded into his mind, and 
 
HATH SAID IN HIS HEART— 175 
 
 who does not feel that it would be unspeakable 
 if peace were made until Prussia had paid to 
 the last farthing for her crime. 
 
 The atrocities were not wisely calculated, but 
 they were calculated. They were part of a 
 deliberate 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 
 execution or worse the most obviously helpless 
 and harmless non-combatants, the very people 
 whose presence and activities could not pos- 
 sibly constitute a military danger? Why make 
 such a speciality 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-inch 
 howitzers? How can old women and young 
 girls resist the Prussian Guard ? How can the 
 cutting off of a baby's fingers or the gouging 
 of one of its eyes help your plan of campaign ? 
 Do you expect the war to last till it grows up ? 
 
176 THE PRUSSIAN 
 
 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 memories. Women in civilized 
 war are held sacred ; therefore we murder and 
 outrage them to show that we are not waging 
 civilized war. The helplessness of a child 
 appeals irresistibly to the human heart; there- 
 fore 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 mutila- 
 tion of non-combatants applies also to the de- 
 struction of public and ancient buildings, the 
 bombardment of undefended towns and the 
 like. These also were in most instances not 
 spontaneous, but calculated. The calculation 
 was this : " The Belgians value their historic 
 
HATH SAID IN HIS HEART— 177 
 
 monuments and will dislike their being de- 
 stroyed. If we choose the one which they hold 
 most sacred, every other town which possesses 
 and values similar treasures will be put in fear. 
 We will burn Louvain, taking special care to 
 destroy its valuable library. Then such towns 
 as Ghent, Bruges, Brussels itself, Antwerp will 
 be the less likely to offer resistance, 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 
 desired to avoid the wholesale demolition of 
 the memorials of their past. 
 
 All this is what distinguishes Prussian 
 atrocities 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 German commanders had received 
 orders to create " a certain frightfulness " in 
 
178 THE PRUSSIAN 
 
 Belgium. These officers, who had studied the 
 military text-books of their country and knew 
 exactly what was 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 produce : be- 
 cause they were afraid to disobey. Every one 
 who values the chivalric element in war prefers 
 to admire his enemy, and one is therefore glad 
 to note the several occasions upon which, ac- 
 cording to reliable testimony, the German 
 soldiers really did "get out of hand" and 
 behave like decent and kindly Europeans. In 
 the German Navy, when no special orders for 
 atrocities appear to have been issued, the 
 German record seems to be pretty 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 
 Prussian spirit that I have hardly left myself 
 space to speak of its other and much less 
 
HATH SAID IN HIS HEART— 179 
 
 important quality, which is also the conse- 
 quence of its loss, or rather repudiation, of the 
 idea of "honour," its curious vulgarity. But 
 that quality is very apparent, whether in the 
 Emperor's crude and effeminate sneers at his 
 "contemptible" enemies, 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 pf a common 
 burglar. Morals apart, what has become of the 
 common sense of human dignity in royal per- 
 sonages 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 th^t in looting peaceful houses 
 he is showing himself in the light of a splendid 
 and renowned conqueror. The only answer is 
 that civilized people do not feel like that. 
 
 We may take it, then, that the atrocities of 
 the Prussians are in the main calculated and 
 deliberately ordered. Nevertheless, the fact 
 remains that human nature is so made that if 
 you force men on pain of death or savage 
 
180 THE PRUSSIAN 
 
 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 
 involves tends to produce that fearful moral 
 disease 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 chivalrous, 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 
 notorious 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 remem- 
 ber, was that the Belgians were suffering from 
 a " collective hallucination," the result of their 
 " illiteracy " and of the unaccustomed " excite- 
 ment" 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 
 
HATH SAID IN HIS HEART— 181 
 
 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 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 out- 
 rages both on human beings and on historic 
 monuments. 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 Cathe- 
 dral, 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 Office, but it hardly 
 needed refutation. The fact that it was not 
 
182 THE PRUSSIAN 
 
 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 after-thought. 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 
 military, for the outrage. It must have been 
 simply malicious; that is to say, it proceeded 
 from an evil will. 
 
 And yet there was a sense in which these 
 Prussian soldiers were right. In attacking the 
 monuments of the old civic freedom in Flan- 
 ders 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 
 
HATH SAID IN HIS HEART— 183 
 
 Count Robert had held his own against the 
 Danes, their centre swept southward across the 
 Marne. 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 
 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 sud- 
 denly on their flank with a great reserve 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 VII 
 
 "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 
 Prussian policy from the days of Frederick the 
 Great to the time of writing, and to show why, 
 if Europe was not to perish, a European com- 
 bination formed for the purpose of disarming 
 Prussia was inevitable. From that argument 
 a clear, practical 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 un- 
 
 chivalrous and unmilitary conception) for three 
 
 reasons. 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 
 
 184 
 
THE PRUSSIAN HATH SAID— 185 
 
 bound for their own sake to do so. Secondly, 
 the complete failure of the Prussian attempt 
 to crush France before the pressure of Russia 
 began to be felt, implies the failure of the 
 calculation upon which the Prussians them- 
 selves relied for success. Thirdly, it is no 
 good discussing what would happen to Europe 
 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 affects this country. 
 
 We say, and say justly, that for the purposes 
 of this war we are a united people. That state- 
 ment 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 
 individuals who have, for one reason or 
 
186 THE PRUSSIAN 
 
 another, been temporarily or permanently de- 
 nationalized. Those who cannot conceive of 
 such a state of things are simply those to whom 
 the word Democracy has never had any real 
 meanijig. Real democracy would mean 
 government not by artificial electioneering 
 majorities, but by just such corporate acts of 
 the national will. 
 
 Nevertheless, it would be an error not to 
 realize 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 (unless they are actually traitors) 
 have at this moment a single will. That a 
 particular Frenchman happens to be a Catholic 
 or a Freethinker, a Socialist or a Royalist, 
 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 con- 
 spicuous illustration of the national temper. 
 
HATH SAID IN HIS HEART— 187 
 
 M. Anatole France, for many years'^ pro- 
 tagonist of Pacifism, had, while warmly sup- 
 porting the war, ventured to repeat some of 
 the old futile, but (in the particular circum- 
 stances) more or lessVeasonable, rubbish about 
 "international solidarity." He was instantly 
 denounced — and very characteristically de- 
 nounced with special vehemence by Gustav 
 Herve, once so strenuous an Anti-Militarist 
 — 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 Russia you might find, perhaps, a 
 few unnational 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, 
 believe ourselves to be safe from any invasion 
 by the German army, and from the consequent 
 repetition in Kent or Essex of the scenes which 
 Flanders and Champagne have witnessed. I 
 fancy that if there were a serious naval disaster 
 or a raid upon our coasts, the populace would 
 make very short work of the Pacifists. While, 
 
188 THE PRUSSIAN 
 
 however, we feel fairly secure we are not pre- 
 pared to proceed to extremes, and such men 
 are suffered to write and pamphleteer and even 
 to venture on speech-making without serious 
 molestation. 
 
 The same sense of security leads us to 
 tolerate, as certainly no other nation would 
 tolerate, the immunity which our Government 
 extends to men of German birth and associa- 
 tions; 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 tolera- 
 tion 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 existence of these two groups may 
 appear later. 
 
 So long as the issue remains in any way 
 
HATH SAID IN HIS HEART— 189 
 
 doubtful, 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 victories, 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 
 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 
 opinions (or interests) of certain groups of 
 wealthy men. And th^re is, unfortunately, a 
 great deal of money and what is euphemistic- 
 ally called "influence," which is ready to be 
 mobilized 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 for- 
 get that up to the very moment when war was 
 
190 THE PRUSSIAN 
 
 declared there was a considerable section of it 
 that was sympathetic with our enemies. 
 
 The Daily News and the Star are the pro- 
 perty of a rich cocoa manufacturer, who hap- 
 pens to inherit 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 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 protest- 
 ing against our intervention, among the names 
 appended being the significant one of Mr. Neil 
 Primrose, a " Liberal Imperialist " by profes- 
 sion, but also a Rothschild by blood. Even 
 the determination of Prussia to violate the 
 neutrality of Belgium did not apparently 
 satisfy the Cocoa Press that our action was 
 legitimate, and the first leading article that 
 appeared in its organ on the outbreak of war, 
 expressed an only slightly chastened protest. 
 It was not till a few days later that the Daily 
 
HATH SAID IN HIS HEART— 191 
 
 News professed a complete conversion — the 
 contents of the Official 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 Government. But it is impossible 
 to avoid asking oneself the question : Might 
 not another conversion, equally sudden and 
 miraculous, appear as the first result of a 
 decisive victory of the Allies.'' Is the old 
 Cadbury dead, or only sleeping? 
 
 Another principal " Liberal " organ, the 
 W estminster Gazette, is mainly in the hands 
 of Sir Alfred Moritz Mond, a wealthy manu- 
 facturer of chemicals, who has " obtained " a 
 baronetcy from the Government as well as a 
 seat in the House of Commons. He was, as 
 we learn from Who's Who, born in this country 
 — 'to be exact, at Farnworth, near Widnes, in 
 Lancashire. But his father, one Dr. Ludwig 
 Mond, was undoubtedly of German birth. Sir 
 Alfred Mond is, I have said, the virtual director 
 of the policy of the Westminster Gazette. 
 
 For at least a week before the outbreak of 
 the war the Westminster Gazette was publish- 
 ing communications from "Our Own Cor- 
 
192 THE PRUSSIAN 
 
 respondent " in Berlin, every one of which was 
 calculated to advantage the German Govern- 
 ment in the diplomatic struggle which was to 
 culminate in the war. On July 27 "Our Own 
 Correspondent " gives expression to the " feel- 
 ing" that the only means of avoiding an 
 immediate and general European War is " the 
 abstention of Russia from intervention." 
 " Russia," he says, " will not be allowed to 
 meddle in what is claimed to be entirely an 
 Austro- Serbian affair." The policy of England 
 is next considered, and it is stated that the 
 British Foreign Office may exert "a really 
 determining influence" if it "dissociates itself 
 clearly from attempts to intervene against 
 Austria." " It is assumed," we are told, " that 
 such is British policy." 
 
 On July 30 we are treated to the pleasing 
 news "that the Westminster Gazette's sugges- 
 tion that assurances should be given to Russia 
 that Austria will not annex Servian territory 
 or extinguish Servian independence" — a pro- 
 posal which Russia could not possibly accept, 
 and a proposal, be it noted, of the very same 
 character as that which we laughed to scorn 
 when proffered by Prussia in the case of 
 
HATH SAID IN HIS HEART— 193 
 
 Belgium — has been " printed in large type " in 
 the Koelnische Zeitung, proudly described by 
 "Our Own Correspondent" himself as "the 
 organ of Wilhelmstrasse." In the same com- 
 munication it is remarked that the statement of 
 another London newspaper (not the property 
 of Sir Moritz Mond) that " England must stand 
 by her friends " " has created an unfavourable 
 impression." 
 
 July 31 was, it will be remembered, the day 
 on which the Prussian Government sent an 
 ultimatum to Russia and another to France. 
 On this same day " Our Own Correspondent," 
 speaking this time in his own person, assures 
 his readers that " the Imperial Government and 
 the Emperor do not want war," tries to throw 
 the whole blame on Russia, congratulates his 
 proprietors upon the fact that " all the Berlin 
 newspapers give prominence to the West- 
 minster Gazette's declaration of yesterday that 
 England must keep a free hand," and that an 
 anti-English journal "which bitterly attacked 
 Sir Edward Grey's proposal as partisanship 
 against Austria, approves the Westminster's 
 view as likely to check any aggressive ardour 
 in Paris." 
 
194 THE PRUSSIAN 
 
 Next day, August i, came the climax. 
 Under staring head-lines there appeared a 
 " Special Message " from the German Govern- 
 ment to the Westminster Gazette. " In the 
 hope," writes " Our Own Correspondent," " of 
 yet preventing the world war, and in the alter- 
 native hope of justifying Germany's position 
 to England, whose friendship she still desires, 
 I am formally authorized by the Foreign Office 
 to make to the Westminster Gazette the follow- 
 ing momentous declaration. . . ." The "de- 
 claration " is nothing but the repetition of the 
 notorious and characteristic Prussian lie about 
 German efforts to restrain Austria, a lie with 
 which I have already dealt in these pages ; but 
 the "formal authorization" is interesting and 
 significant. 
 
 When the war actually broke out the 
 Westminster Gazette did not even show the 
 Daily News' measure of hesitation. It became 
 at once enthusiastically warlike. "We can do 
 no other," it remarked, quoting the words of 
 that great Teutonic teacher, who had, as we 
 may presume, led it to a true knowledge of 
 revealed religion. No doubt at that moment 
 it could not. But it may, later on. 
 
HATH SAID IN HIS HEART— 195 
 
 Add to these powerful newspaper proprie- 
 tors the number of great financiers of German 
 birth or family connections to whom I have 
 alluded — ^the Chairman of one of our greatest 
 English Banks was bom a German; and 
 another born German, who has actually a 
 brother in Frankfort advising the Prussian 
 Government, and another brother in New York 
 patronizing and financing the anti-English 
 campaign in that city, is virtual master of 
 London's transit — and it will be obvious that 
 there is plenty of influential backing available 
 for a Pacifist campaign when the right moment 
 comes. As to the lines upon which such a 
 campaign might be developed, we have a 
 significant hint from an incident which occurred 
 in the quite early days of the war. 
 
 On September lo this year the Morning 
 Post published a circular which had been 
 secretly sent out t<> those who were, as we may 
 suppose, regardefd as suitable recipients. It 
 bore the following signatures : " J. Ramsay 
 Macdonald," " Charles Trevelyan," " Norman 
 Angell," and " E. D. Morel," who is described 
 as "Hon. Sec. and Treasurer (J>ro tern.)." It 
 contained, of course, a great deal of irrelevant 
 
196 THE PRUSSIAN 
 
 verbiage, but we shall not be far wrong if we 
 consider the third proposed object of the move- 
 ment 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 defeated nation, or an artifi- 
 cial 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 Prussian entourage were 
 to be spared the " humiliation " which — though 
 perhaps less painful than the fate of the in- 
 habitants 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 organized and speakers provided. But 
 the immediate need is, in our opinion, to pre- 
 pare 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 pub- 
 lication when the proper opportunity occurs. 
 For this purpose we shall be glad of any sub- 
 scription which you can spare, and would like 
 to know if you are willing to support us in this 
 
HATH SAID IN HIS HEART— 197 
 
 effort, in order that we may communicate with 
 you as occasion arises." 
 
 I do not profess to know when thfe signatories 
 of the precious 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 premature publication, a week 
 later, of an official manifesto, to which were 
 appended the same signatures with the addi- 
 tional 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 desir- 
 ability of sparing 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 " demo- 
 cracy" and "nationality," the need of a per- 
 manent peace, the impropriety of transferring 
 populations from one State to another against 
 their will (this from the apologists of Prussia !), 
 and the wickedness of what is called "secret 
 
198 THE PRUSSIAN 
 
 diplomacy." Some of the observations made 
 are just, others are somewhat foolish and 
 visionary, others may be regarded as sound or 
 unsound, according to the precise meaning to 
 be put upon their very vague and obscure 
 phraseology. Had we had nothing but this 
 public 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 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 
 underrate their abilities. Mr. Macdonald is an 
 astute political intriguer, who for years " led " 
 the " Labour Party " — on more than one occa- 
 sion into the enemy's camp. The gentleman 
 who signs himself "Norman Angell" — a cer- 
 tain Mr. Lane, I believe — is certainly the ablest 
 of Lord Northcliffe's journalistic pupils, and 
 
HATH SAID IN HIS HEART— 199 
 
 has acquired a great reputation (in Carmelite 
 Street) as an original thinker on the strength 
 of a crude restatement without acknowledg- 
 ment of some of the less well-founded conclu- 
 sions of the late Richard Cobden. Mr. Morel 
 has for years specialized in Anti-Belgian and 
 Anti-French agitations, all of them more or 
 less favourable to German interests. There is, 
 therefore, nothing surprising in finding him 
 " Hon, Sec. (^ro tern) " of an Anti-English 
 agitation, now that England and Germany are 
 at war. As for Messrs. Trevelyan and Pon- 
 sonby, 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 persons in their attempts, at a 
 critical moment, to confuse the 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 efforts that the Pacifists may make 
 in this country will in any case be nullified by 
 
200 THE PRUSSIAN 
 
 the determination of France and Russia to 
 make an end for ever of the Prussian menace. 
 That is perfectly true, but most of us would not 
 be content to see England a passive and neg- 
 ligible 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 Scot- 
 land 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 wish the influence 
 of England to be felt, and we wish it to be 
 felt as a force making for the final and decisive 
 overthrow of that enemy which is especially 
 hers as well as Europe's. 
 
 Now, for myself, directly I saw from a com- 
 parison of their expurgated and unexpurgated 
 manifestoes 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" 
 
HATH SAID IN HIS HEART— 201 
 
 with successive rebuttals. Moreover, some of 
 these aspirations were in themselves reasonable 
 and desirable, while an explanation of the 
 obvious difficulties involved would be tedious, 
 and, from the poigt of view of popular propa- 
 ganda, 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. Macdonald to feel for the humiliation 
 of any one below the rank of an Emperor. But 
 I, with my thoughts fixed on the humiliation, 
 the oppression, the mutilation and torture of a 
 dozen free and. gallant peoples, from the Poles 
 to the Belgians, wahted Prussia not only 
 humiliated but utterly wiped out. And the 
 only way to assist in the accomplishment 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 
 
202 THE PRUSSIAN 
 
 accomplish. 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 this country 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 destroyed" — 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 
 making a diversion in the interests of Prussia. 
 We need not argue with them on the side- 
 issues which they will try 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. 
 
HATH SAID IN HIS HEART— 203 
 
 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 
 Prussia — ^which must be destroyed." 
 
 They may say : " Germany has her own con- 
 tribution to make to the common civilization 
 of Europe. Think of all that we owe to her ! 
 Think of her quaint legends and kindly cere- 
 monies ! Think of her music of Beethoven, the 
 poetry of Schiller, the philosophy of Kant, the 
 art of Albert Diirer! 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 for ever — after 
 Prussia is destroyed." 
 
 And finally they may say : " After this dread- 
 ful war is over, shall there not be universal 
 peace and good will among men for ever?" And 
 we, perceiving their thoughts, shall answer : 
 " What hast thou to do with peace, O Apologist 
 of Devils? Get thee behind me! Prussia 
 must be destroyed ! " 
 
 Prussia is already judged by Jier peers, and 
 
204 THE PRUSSIAN 
 
 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 
 innumerable wicked things — the wickedest 
 thing being, perhaps, the aid which each, at 
 one time or another, has given to this universal 
 enemy of European civilization and Christian 
 morals. For that sin, each is paying in the 
 agony of the present war, in the toll of her dead 
 and the sorrow of her mourners. And it need 
 not be denied that on the record of England, 
 of France, of Russia, there are 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 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 
 
HATH SAID IN HIS HEART— 205 
 
 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 
 animated by a certain spirit, and a certain 
 creed. In whatsoever things that spirit and 
 creed may be inherent, a dynasty, an army, a 
 political system, a caste — those things must, 
 at the end of this war, cease to exist. From 
 whatever federation or grouping of States it 
 may be suitable to create in the Germanics, 
 everything Prussian must be excluded. Prus- 
 sian rulers must never again have access to the 
 wealth of stolen provinces, like Silesia and 
 Westphalia, on which to build great armies 
 and fleets. 
 
 The Prussians must be hedged and con- 
 fined 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 
 justify the vast sacrifices and awful perils of 
 
206 THE PRUSSIAN 
 
 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 for 
 ever prevent her from recovering her strength. 
 Nor would the dethronement, or exile, or death 
 of any one man even 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 
 Satanism 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 immortality 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 
 
HATH SAID IN HIS HEART— 207 
 
 means of ceremonies almost 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 human form, now in one man, 
 now in another. These men die, but the spirit 
 is not laid. Continually it reappears, thirsty 
 for the horrible wine that runs in the veins of 
 men, sucking the life of ijations, 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 remak- 
 ing of Christendom to test their strength and 
 wisdom. But one task must come before all 
 others : the driving of the dreadful stake 
 through the vampire heart of Frederick the 
 Second. 
 
CHAPTER VIII 
 
 AFTER THE WAR 
 
 We have not infrequently heard lately a 
 certain expression about this war; it is a special 
 favourite with newly converted Pacifists, who 
 are naturally unwilling to confess that their 
 past professions and ideals were wholly illu- 
 sory. This, it is said, is a war to end war. 
 
 For myself, I do not think that a good 
 description either of the object or of the prob- 
 able 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 un- 
 happy society and the ordinary imperfections 
 common to all human societies. We can still 
 see the distinction — though even this Eugeiiists 
 are busily trying to make us lose sight of — in 
 
 208 
 
THE PRUSSIAN HATH SAID— 209 
 
 matters affecting bodily well-being. When a 
 doctor tells us that if we follow a certain treat- 
 ment we shall be well soon, we do not under- 
 stand 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 inequalities 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 certainly 
 never except in the last stages of national 
 decline — as a thing normal and unalterable 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 — a thing which no nation has ever either 
 
210 THE PRUSSIAN 
 
 attained or desired. The same kind of people 
 will think that if you defend the institution of 
 marriage you are maintaining that all marriages 
 are ideally happy. They will also tell you that 
 " alcohol " is a poison, and deduce that ale 
 ought to be treated like prussic acid. 
 
 There is just the same lack of the power to 
 distinguish between the normal and the abnor- 
 mal in much of the talk we hear about " Militar- 
 ism." 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 Russians. 
 And then the repentant Pacifist perhaps says, 
 " Yes ; but our Militarism is not so bad as 
 German Militarism." And then we have a 
 discussion as to whether Russian Militarism 
 is not worse than German Militarism. And, 
 meanwhile, no one thinks of asking what exact 
 meaning is to be attached to the word Militar- 
 ism. 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. 
 
HATH SAID IN HIS HEART— 211 
 
 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 be- 
 tween States and individuals, in a word, to 
 deny all those principles upon which the comity 
 of Europe is founded ; and when she proposed 
 to back these denials with an immense arma- 
 ment created for the purpose, the most honour- 
 able 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 nevertheless 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 
 abnormal in that; if it is an imperfection, it is 
 
212 THE PRUSSIAN 
 
 an imperfection incidental to the organization 
 of men in nations, and can only be destroyed 
 by destroying nations — an idea as unthinkable 
 as it is odious. But there is something abnor- 
 mal 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 and armed in 
 support of that challenge, yet which the other 
 nations would not fight. From that unnatural 
 condition directly proceeded a disease from 
 which it is not unreasonable 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 -supremacy in arms that she challenged 
 the conscience 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 
 Dreadnought answered Dreadnought, and the 
 whole energies of Europe were directed to a 
 
HATH SAID IN HIS HEART— 213 
 
 single end — the creation of mightier and more 
 costly engines of destruction. 
 
 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 pre- 
 paration 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, has, as I have 
 said, an abnormal condition, which could never 
 have come into being or been maintained but 
 for the presence of something unwholesome in 
 the constitution of Europe — the unwholesome 
 thing being, of course, the military power of the 
 great Atheist State. 
 
 I need hardly explain that I do not mean 
 that the nations of Europe should have refused 
 to take part in the competition which Prussia 
 had started and steadily maintained. That 
 would simply have been buttering themselves 
 for Prussia to eat. I think that the more manly, 
 and in the long run more prudent, course would 
 have been to have accepted the Prussian chal- 
 lenge and fought when it was first offered. 
 
214 THE PRUSSIAN 
 
 Failing that, there was nothing for it but for 
 all of us to be prepared for the i':sue which 
 every sane man could see must come. For my 
 own part, I have nothing to repent of in the 
 matter : I always supported every proposal for 
 the strengthening both of our military and of 
 our naval forces. I have sometimes thought, 
 however, that a word of repentance is due from 
 some of those who now profess to recognize 
 the indisputable fact of Prussian aggression, 
 yet who a very little while ago were not only 
 denouncing and ridiculing as " scaremongers " 
 every one who drew attention to it, but in some 
 cases — notably in their attacks on Mr. Blatch- 
 ford, 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 
 see that it does 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 
 normal. The sanctity of treaties will have been 
 
HATH SAID IN HIS HEART— 215 
 
 vindicated. The power of Europe to defend 
 its traditions by arms against any who disputed 
 them will have been established. There will 
 be a recognized 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. 
 
 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 disgrace attached 
 to the practice. But the organization 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, of 
 course, to follow her example, though none of 
 them have gone to the same lengths. The 
 system of promiscuous payment for all infor- 
 mation received, which makes every German, 
 naturalized or unnaturalized, resident in a 
 
216 THE PRUSSIAN 
 
 foreign country a potential spy, is peculiar to 
 the Prussian Government. One may reason- 
 ably hope that with the destruction of that 
 Government it will cease to exist, and that in 
 time of peace national hospitality will cease to 
 be systematically abused. 
 
 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 
 virtue ; the other is by depriving them of their 
 manhood. 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 more wars, no 
 doubt; perhaps more than ever when the evil 
 fear which underlay the Armed Peace is lifted 
 from the heart of Europe. But it is fair enough 
 to hope that these wars will be conducted under 
 strict rules of honour, 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 employed in Belgium, 
 will be forbidden by that common conscience 
 of Christendom which our arms are now 
 vindicating. 
 
 There remain to be considered the indirect 
 results of a Prussian overthrow, and these. 
 
HATH SAID IN HIS HEART— 217 
 
 though no man can foresee them exactly, cannot 
 fail to be of enormous moment. 
 
 First among them I should place the dis- 
 credit and disfavour which must more or less 
 overtake all those experiments in imitation of 
 the Prussian system which have been popular 
 in so many nations of late years. For instance, 
 when the Chancellor of the Exchequer intro- 
 duced his celebrated 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 recommendation 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 its citi- 
 zens as slaves. The fall of Prussia can hardly fail 
 to produce a reaction in favour of freedom, and 
 that reaction will be strengthened by the know- 
 ledge of the informed that more than one Prus- 
 sian failure has been really due to the superior- 
 ity of troops not subjected to the Prussian sort 
 of terrorism. The servile theory of society 
 towards which so much of Europe (and this 
 country in particular) has recently been tending 
 will receive a set-back; and there will be a 
 
218 THE PRUSSIAN 
 
 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 Collectivist form. That form is almost 
 as essentially Prussian as the tyranny against 
 which it appears as a reaction. As a specula- 
 tion 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 
 universal State ownership. In point of fact 
 German Social Democracy is based upon the 
 same principles as Prussian Imperialism. It 
 accepts the same materialist basis; it founds 
 its claims not, as the earlier French Socialist 
 did, on an abstract 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 Prussian Imperialist, thinks of machines 
 as controlling men, not as controlled by them. 
 Like him, he regards his victory as "inevit- 
 able." Like him, he is indifferent to freedom, 
 and unable to think of men as men or of 
 families as families. 
 
HATH SAID IN HIS HEART— 219 
 
 Finally, like his masters, he is beautifully 
 conscious of his own superiority to the rest of 
 the human race. I remember, in my Socialist 
 days, attending a meeting of the International 
 Socialist Congress at Amsterdam, and listening 
 to a German Socialist who made a speech 
 almost indistinguishable from one of the 
 Kaiser's own. It was all about German Culture 
 and the Teutonic 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 Jaures, whose 
 subconscious Gallic patriotism it succeeded in 
 jarring into life. The German had asked the 
 world to look at the three million Socialist 
 voters of the German Empire. "Yes," said 
 Jaures, " look at them ! When there are three 
 million Socialists in France, something will 
 happen ! " It was profoundly true. But Jaures 
 never, perhaps, realized 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 pro- 
 fessional troops, freely enlisted and treated 
 
220 THE PRUSSIAN 
 
 respectfully and as free men by their officers, 
 a victory of the Allies in this war, whether of 
 French or Russians, Belgians or Serbians, is 
 a victory of free peasants, men who own their 
 own land, independent 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 Prussian 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 replacing the 
 present unstable balance 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 
 civilization. I have called the Prussians bar- 
 barians, and spiritually speaking it is pro- 
 foundly true that the Russian is a much more 
 civilized 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 barbar- 
 ism" against German Culture, and in which 
 many Englishmen have been accustomed to 
 use it; and, using it in that sense, barbarism 
 
HATH SAID IN HIS HEART— 221 
 
 has done not a little to justify itself of late. 
 The splendid military qualities revealed re- 
 cently 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 
 happier) than it was under simpler conditions. 
 A victory for Prussia would be a defeat for 
 civilization, 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 civiliza- 
 tion, if civilization means Krupp. On the other 
 hand, defeat of Prussia by Russia would be 
 victory for the view that it fares ill with the 
 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 very high in honour among the nations. 
 At present there is perceptible in this country 
 a curious, and to my mind a somewhat un- 
 gracious, disposition to speak of Serbia as if 
 she were in some way not quite respectable. 
 Even Mr. George, in defending Serbia, finds 
 
222 THE PRUSSIAN 
 
 it necessary to say that her record is "not 
 unspotted." Neither is Mr. 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 Ser- 
 bia's whole history is one long fight against 
 tyranny. 
 
 By the geographical accident of her situation 
 she has had in the present war to fight her own 
 battle far away from her powerful allies, and 
 she has fought it with splendid spirit, refusing 
 to remain on the defensive, and pushing, when- 
 ever fortune favoured her, raids into the very 
 heart of the mighty empire which had sought 
 to crush her. I should not be surprised if, 
 when the war is over, Serbia were to become a 
 sort of exemplar for the many gallant little 
 nations whom the overthrow of Prussia will 
 enlarge. 
 
 There is a mordant contrast between the 
 conduct and fortunes of the two small nation- 
 alities which have been involved in this war. 
 Serbia was the terror of diplomatists and a 
 standing nuisance to all the chancelleries^ of 
 Europe. Not only was she regrettably addicted 
 to exhibiting her power of self-defence, but she 
 displayed an even more perverse determination 
 
HATH SAID IN HIS HEART— 223 
 
 to liberate by arms her fellow-countrymen 
 oppressed by alien yoke. By her unrepentant 
 pugnacity she kept all the statesmen in a con- 
 tinual fret over the security of their detestable 
 and cowardly " Armed Peace." In a word, she 
 had thoroughly mastered the sound advice 
 which Byron gave to the oppressed nations 
 of South-Eastern 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 observed her neutrality. The result is 
 that her territory has been violated, her fields 
 ravaged, her cities burnt and sacked, her peace- 
 ful population 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 tolerated the existence of that Power. 
 She will assuredly 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 
 
224 THE PRUSSIAN 
 
 won back her soil and taken her share of venge- 
 ance on her enemies, it would be surprising 
 if she consented again to hold her own by 
 permission of any one but her heroic self. 
 
 And as I think this war will change our 
 conception of civilization, 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 fellow, 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 
 candidates submitted to the electors of Drab- 
 bleton-on-Ouse. When we have seen how 
 obviously more democratic are the Russians 
 under their Tsar than are the Germans under 
 their Prussian ruling caste, we shall perhaps 
 realize that democracy does not depend on 
 electoral machinery, but that, on the contrary, 
 the success of any machinery, electoral or 
 otherwise, depends on democracy. 
 
HATH SAID IN HIS HEART— 225 
 
 Russia 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 
 corruption, her espionage, her persecution of 
 subject peoples — appear to have been Prussian 
 exports supported continually by Prussian in- 
 fluence; while all the things that are evidently 
 and splendidly 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. Peters- 
 burg to Petrograd was not more important than 
 any constitutional 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 Par- 
 liamentarism (which has not been so con- 
 spicuous 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. 
 
 In one respect at least the Russification of 
 
 Q 
 
226 THE PRUSSIAN 
 
 Russia must almost certainly mean a victory 
 for liberty 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 favour- 
 able to Polish liberty, and threw all his energies 
 into the work of opposing Polish liberty for 
 that reason. But this war is the triumph of 
 Panslavism, and therefore the defeat of 
 Poland's enemies both within and without 
 the Russian Empire. 
 
 There is another reason why, apart from any 
 confidence in the Russian 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 invited his neighbours to that 
 horrible sacrament of murder. A divided 
 Poland had the hopeless task of fighting three 
 great empires, if she would seek her inde- 
 pendence. A united Poland under Russian 
 hegemony would, if oppression were attempted, 
 have, at worst, only one enemy to oppose, and 
 would enjoy the good wishes and perhaps the 
 
HATH SAID IN HIS HEART— 227 
 
 active support of the other European Powers, 
 as well as of the considerable body of opinion 
 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 desirable in the interests of all European 
 peoples than in their own. In particular the 
 three principal Allies have suffered continually 
 from the effects of the dispersion of this alien 
 element throughout 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 insoluble problem. But now, 
 since the folly or treason of the " Young 
 Turks" has thrown the Ottoman Empire into 
 the melting-pot, an entirely unexpected oppor- 
 tunity arises of solving that problem. The 
 difficulty has been that while the Jews could 
 never be absorbed into the civilization of any 
 European country, it was hardly consonant with 
 justice to treat them as foreigners, since there 
 was no foreign nation to which they could be 
 
228 THE PRUSSIAN 
 
 attached. Now, however, their ancient country 
 of Palestine is available, and there is no reason 
 why an independent Jewish State should not 
 be established there, though Christians would 
 naturally prefer that the Holy Places should 
 be placed under international control. It 
 would not be reasonable to expect that all Jews 
 should return to Palestine, but once the Jewish 
 State exists, with a Palestinian Ambassador in 
 every capital and Palestinian Consuls in all the 
 principal towns to support the interests of the 
 dispersed Jews, it would be easy to treat them 
 in every country as a foreign community with 
 their proper privileges and their proper dis- 
 qualifications. 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 take a 
 lead 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 mili- 
 tary efforts of theirs, in which their real soul 
 is best and most fully expressed, the French 
 
HATH SAID IN HIS HEART— 229 
 
 will ever again feel satisfied with the effete 
 Parliamentarism that so constantly misrepre- 
 sents them. Not that I should anticipate that 
 Royalism will gain by the war; I should think 
 that it would be almost annihilated by it. For 
 my own part, I have always felt that if I were 
 a Frenchman I could not possibly be a Royal- 
 ist, if only because a Restoration 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 frangaise may have shown them- 
 selves, the fact must remain 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 Stras- 
 burg. I should rather expect that the French 
 would recover under the symbols of the Revolu- 
 tion those things which have continually proved 
 consonant with their blood and civilization — 
 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. 
 
230 THE PRUSSIAN 
 
 One thing at least we may confidently expect 
 — a final end to the sectarian policy dictated 
 to the French Government by the Masonic 
 Lodges. By one of those ironies of which all 
 history is full, a law originally passed by the 
 Masons as an insult to the 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 effect the 
 obliteration of Prussia will have upon Germany. 
 
 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 
 reappear. 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 
 decide 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 
 
HATH SAID IN HIS HEART— 231 
 
 is that Prussia should be entirely excluded 
 from any such arrangement. 
 
 There is no reason for imposing upon the 
 Hapsburgs 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 
 themselves to be made the cat's-paw of Prussia 
 the Hapsburgs had shown no little skill and 
 tact in driving a varied team of kingdoms and 
 parliaments, 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 
 annexed to France, and Posen will form part 
 of a united Poland, with the Tsar as its king. 
 The fate of Schleswig-Holstein raises a ques- 
 tion of peculiar interest to this country, for the 
 Kiel Canal runs through these territories. 
 
232 THE PRUSSIAN 
 
 Among the many broken pledges of Prussia 
 there is one that now possesses a certain interest 
 — a pledge to take a plebiscite of the Schles- 
 wigers and Holsteiners as to their future. 
 There is no reason why that plebiscite should 
 not now be taken, or why any parts of these 
 provinces that desired reunion with Denmcirk 
 should not have their will. Our own interests 
 clearly demand that in any case either the Kiel 
 Canal must (its fortresses being dismantled) be 
 placed wholly in the hands of a Power too 
 small to be dangerous, or it must be destroyed. 
 That, with the destruction or surrender of the 
 German Fleet, and the recession of Heligo- 
 land, and with such indemnity as we may be 
 able to enforce and such colonies as we may 
 choose to take, should be our 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 do so. I think 
 that a serious disaster would probably have 
 forced Englishmen to wake 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 
 
HATH SAID IN HIS HEART— 233 
 
 governing 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 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 Prussia — 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 hofae 
 of late. We have seen how our national action 
 has been embarrassed, both before and since 
 the outbreak of war, by the presence in posi- 
 tions of great political influence of men who 
 were not of our blood and could not be ex- 
 pected to share our national feeling. But that 
 brings up the whole question of governnlent by 
 secret payments, to which some of us have been 
 
234 THE PRUSSIAN 
 
 trying to direct public attention for years. If 
 you give political power in return for a secret 
 subscription to the Party Funds, you neces- 
 sarily give that power not only to the English 
 plutocrat, but to the foreigner and perhaps to 
 the traitor. Mr. Carnegie, the eulogist of the 
 Kaiser and the enemy of slaughter (except when 
 inflicted on unarmed workmen at Pittsburg), 
 is reputed to be a subscriber to these funds. 
 He is an American manufacturer. I know of no 
 reason why the Kaiser himself should not have 
 subscribed. 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 foreign 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 affected our policy up to the 
 very point at which such influence would be- 
 come open treason. It is certain, as I have said, 
 that, even up to the moment of war, all the 
 forces of cosmopolitan finance were ranged on 
 the side of a dishonourable peace. 
 
 The strong resentment now felt against the 
 
HATH SAID IN HIS HEART— 235 
 
 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 
 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. 
 Ransome, that it will tend to make the nations 
 which have taken part in it increasingly 
 national. 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 " Inter- 
 nationalism." When I was a Socialist it was 
 supposed (I never could imagine why) to be a 
 part of Socialism. What it meant I never really 
 discovered. It might, of course, mean some- 
 thing perfectly reasonable and even indisput- 
 
236 THE PRUSSIAN 
 
 able. Thus it might mean that what happened 
 in one nation affected other nations. That is 
 true; but instead of being a reason for expect- 
 ing universal peace, it is obviously a reason 
 for being 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 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 further true that there 
 are human sanctities common to all nations, 
 and which 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 
 sovereign society of which he was a member, 
 but to an abstraction called " The Human 
 Race." This entity must not be confused with 
 the old and sound religious conception of your 
 " duty towards your neighbour " — towards any 
 individual man simply because he is a man. 
 For that duty is defined and reciprocal, while 
 one's duty towards " humanity " was supposed 
 
HATH SAID IN HIS HEART— 237 
 
 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 
 doctrine which I once held, that the means 
 of production 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 mysteri- 
 ously associated in men's minds with " Inter- 
 nationalism." 
 
 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 Inter- 
 national Socialists. They had had years in 
 which to prepare for the crisis which they all 
 told us they foresaw — of course, as the inevit- 
 able result of " economic forces." If they had 
 tried to hold the "proletarians of all lands" 
 from fighting, and had failed, it might have 
 
238 THE PRUSSIAN 
 
 been said that the war came too soon for them, 
 and that a little more " education of the demo- 
 cracy " would have done the trick. But as they 
 themselves, who were presumably as thoroughly 
 " educated " as man could be, were just as eager 
 to offer their services to their respective national 
 governments as were their supporters, we can 
 only presume that their whole theory was based 
 on an illusion. 
 
 It is, of course, true that the French and 
 Belgian 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 Herve said 
 that his loyalty was to some imaginary Inter- 
 national Proletariat and not to France, I have 
 not the shadow of a doubt that what he said 
 was perfectly 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 
 
HATH SAID IN HIS HEART— 239 
 
 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 
 liberation of the poor from the insupportable 
 conditions of our time is the cause best worth 
 fighting 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 hap- 
 pened has not happened, and that this astound- 
 ing revelation of what it is that we really love 
 and reverence, and feel to be worthy of the 
 devotion of our lives, has not come upon us. 
 Either they must be discouraged and feel dis- 
 posed to abandon 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 
 championship 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 naturally saw no difference 
 
240 THE PRUSSIAN HATH SAID— 
 
 between Europeans, just as we see no differ- 
 ence 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 would remind them that during the French 
 Revolution a " patriot " meant especiaHy a 
 revolutionist and a champion of popular 
 rights. 
 
 Let them, therefore, go on championing the 
 rights of the poor against the rich, of the 
 populace against the governing classes ; but let 
 them do so each for his own people, and on a 
 basis of Nationalism. Then, perhaps, they will 
 find the populace listen as they have never 
 listened heretofore. 
 
 As to myself, I never did believe in " The 
 International," even when I was a Socialist and 
 continually heard the word 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. 
 
 Printed in Grbat Britain by Richard Clay & Sons, Limited, 
 
 BRUNSWICK SI c-TflUgnPn "IT E_e «"" gT.«^.v — """""■ "