1 ' ':. ..J >\7 1[, •:. 1 ^mmmir>MS FROM LIFE hl^'QW V \ ^, Vl^RTlN Columbia ©nibersitp LIBRARY GIVEN BY GIFT OF H. W. WILSON / o ^ <^ The War Week by Week As Seen from New York Being Observations from Life By Edward S- Martin New York E» ?♦ Dutton & Company Publishers GIFT OF H. W. VVILSOM MAR 2 2 1929 Copyright, 19 M By life publishing COMPANY Copyright, 1914 By E. p. button & COMPANY 013(S33 rbe "Rniclierbocher preea, "Hew I?orft INTRODUCTION THE war in Europe caught the general American mind quite unprepared. Very- few of us had given more than passing attention to the Euro- pean situation. Most of us who thought about it at all, considered that though the factors that im- periled peace were obstinate and awkward, the cost of a great war and the disturbance attending it would be so enormous as to be prohibitive. So we had formed a habit of not taking first-class European war-clouds seriously. iv INTRODUCTION The second-class clouds, we had noticed, did sometimes result in war, but the big ones had to be blown away; they threatened too much. When the trouble over Servia and the murdered arch- duke came along we were merely interested to see how Europe would get out of it. That she would in some way escape serious consequences we did not doubt. We had often before watched the European diplomatists side-step, and we expected to see them do it again. They would have done it, who can doubt, if time had been given them, but as it was, the incredible happened. These following pages are a record in their way of how the INTRODUCTION v succeeding events affected Ameri- can sensibilities. No one, of course, can assume to speak the sentiments of the people of the United States, but a very large majority of our people seem to have been affected alike by the events that passed before them and the news and the arguments that they read, and their conclu- sions and resulting opinions are probably reflected with fair accur- acy in the pages that come after. Only citizens of German birth or descent and a few others have been able to accept the German point of view and approve the German proceedings. The rest of us — apparently four-fifths of the population — have seemed to see vi INTRODUCTION things about alike, and to place our sympathies almost entirely with the Allies. This American attitude appears to have been a surprise, as well as matter for concern, to the Ger- mans, who seem to have expected that to us as neutrals, their cause would look good. There are de- tails of their position that have a claim on neutral sympathy, and in the end may get it, but from the start these details have been crowded out of consideration by the alarming facts of the proceed- ings before us, and the still more alarming narrations and hypotheses put forward to account for them. We disapproved Germany's im- mense preparedness for war. We INTRODUCTION vii saw in her and no one else the author and compeller of the crush- ing armament of Europe. From Bernhardi we learned of a theory and practice of war, which, unim- portant when read as an academic dissertation, towered up into the proportions of a revelation when all the actual motions of the German machinery began to verify Bern- hardi's forecast. We read Usher and took notice of Pan-Germanism ; we considered the effect of Niet- zsche and Treitschke on the Ger- man moral sense, and all the time, while we were gathering what ideas we coiild about the contents of the contemporary German brain, we had in daily view the tremendous drive of the German Army over viii INTRODUCTION the line into neutral Belgium, and presently on and on, in spite of defenders, through the North of France to the gates of Paris. With that great spectacle of invasion, especially of little Bel- gium, before our eyes, no use to tell us that the Germans were banded together to defend their fatherland. For us there was no sign in these proceedings of defense of the fatherland. It all looked like a well-planned raid on Europe, designed to capture from anyone who had it, anything on land or sea which the German imagina- tion had come to find necessary to realize the huge German ideal. We paid little attention to Russia. Russia is a country we INTRODUCTION ix Americans read about. But Bel- gium and France we know. Penn- sylvania people know them far better than they know California, and Californians know them far better than they know Pennsyl- vania. They are as familiar as Massachusetts, and even more edifying. It was impossible to feel like chilly neutrals about hav- ing them ravaged, f ought-over, burnt-over, mulcted and Ger- manized. We didn't want it done, and the more we saw it done the more we didn't like it. We liked nothing the Germans were doing; nothing that they hoped to do. Every one of their plans, so far as we could get wind of them, aimed to make the world X INTRODUCTICN look less attractive to us. They were destroying our friends, de- stroying our favorite playgrounds, destroying, as at Louvain and Rheims, objects invaluable to us in our humble aspirations to understand life. They were de- stroying in so far as they could the world and the people and the order that we knew and dealt with and considerably liked, and they of- fered us in the place of them '' Deutschland iiber allesf' Perhaps we are ignorant, per- haps we are selfish, perhaps we are not real neutrals. But, again, per- haps we are not Yankees for no- thing. At any rate the swap that Germany proposed did not look good to us on the 4th of August, INTRODUCTION xi and it has not looked good to us since. We are ready to love the Germans whenever they become lovable again and we do admire them even now; we are ready to move up and make room for them if they don't crush in too unmannerly; we are ready to be sorry for them if necessary (as doubtless it will be and is) and to help them as we can when they restmie sanity of life. But with their proceedings in Belgium and their purposes in France we are not pleased; no, not for a minute; and if no choice is given us but whether to see the Germans annihilate the French or the Rus- sians annihilate the Germans, while we don't like either show, of xii INTRODUCTION the two we prefer to have the management run the films that exhibit the activities of the Czar. As for the Germans and the English we feel, primarily, a good deal as we might feel if it were the Germans and the Americans. Here are two full-grown, able-bodied nations. If they have differences that must be fought out, let's form a ring, and maybe when they've lost some blood there will be better feeling between them. But there is more to it than that. England is the background of about half the population of these States. In the British Isles are the chief relics and reminders of our history up to three hundred years ago. We have a great concern, undoubtedly, INTRODUCTION xiii for the preservation of that back- ground. We do not wish to see it Germanized or devastated. We want it still to be there when we go to see it. And the English idea of govern- ment and of colonial administra- tion is vastly nearer our idea than the German method. We should by no means like it to have the branches of the widespreading British tree lopped off and grafted on to the Kaiser^s ambitious empire. And to the English as backers of the Belgians and allies of the French against the devastating German giant, our hearts go out instinctively. Though, plainly enough, England stands in the xiv INTRODUCTION way of Germany's ambition and that gives Germany an under- standable grievance, the same is true of every sovereignty now existing on earth. We all stand in Germany's way in her pre- sent mood, and her apparent willingness and readiness to de- molish us all as soon as she gets around to it, and take what she wants of our belongings, does undeniably give us a fellow-feeling one for another, and an instinctive inclination to edge up fairly close to one another imtil Germany gets new light. CONTENTS Introduction . Caught in a Trap German Intelligence How TO Manage a Continent How We Feel and Why . Voices .... The Dream of Domination Will They Get to Paris? Backing away from Paris The Case of the Kaiser . A Complaint from the Kaiser The Pathos of the Germans A Foundling . The Unscrambling of Europe Let Us Turn out Our Pockets PAGE iii I 14 ^1 33 43 50 60 71 79 84 93 102 118 129 \\n CONTENTS German "Kultur" and the Prussian Idea Dr. Munsterberg's Appeal A Little More Armament for Uncle Sam! . Germany, the Doctor Thinking like a German Germany and Colonies The German Ideal . 139 150. 158 171 180 195 209 The War Week by Week The War: Week by Week CAUGHT IN A TRAP IS it that armament is a trap and Europe is caught in it? What is the inwardness of these pro- ceedings which now, at this writ- ing, have for ten days been going day by day from bad to worse, and read so entirely unlike real life and so much like a forecast-story by H. G. Wells? Is it all happening — has it all 2 THE WAR, WEEK BY WEEK happened — logically, because the causes and the means were there and the clock had struck? Or is it Germany's put-up job again, like the war of 1870? The extraordinary mix-up of it! A Slav-and-Teuton row in Austria, that within ten days brings every gun in Europe out of its rack, fills France and Germany with weeping women, sends German ships scurry- ing to port or holds them there, and closes every stock exchange in the world! The mere wash of this disturbance, look what it does to us ! Our stock exchanges closed for the first time since 1873, our values disordered, our blessed tourists by the thousand running hither and yon in Europe, their CAUGHT IN A TRAP 3 credits useless and no ships to bring them home ! It is Hke being caught in a vast flood, an overwhelming torrent of hate and sudden death from Europe's broken dam. We clutch at the newspapers falling from their presses in continuous showers. We can do little at the moment for our own caught in that huge welter of civilization running amuck, and nothing yet for all those other innocent vic- tims of — what? Victims of what? What has done it? With whom is the final reckoning to be made? It seems a war not brought on by- peoples, but by three aristocratic governments; by the tottering Hapsburgs and their allied interests in Austria, by those governors of 4 THE WAR, WEEK BY WEEK Russia that direct the irresponsible absolutism of which the Czar is the figurehead, and by William the Prussian and the Germany h© stands for. It is no war of France, no war of England. Italy as yet holds off from it. It seems to spell Austria's desperation, Russia's re- sistance, and Germany's oppor- tunity. Well, it is the hundredth year from Waterloo, and we shall see what we shall see; signs and won- ders, who can doubt, and an upshot far beyond calculation. Out of all the sudden din of rumor, prediction, and mobiliza- tion which has proceeded from Europe, it has seemed apparent CA UGHT IN A TRAP 5 that no great power over there wanted to fight except Austria, and she only about enough to chastise the Servians and save herself from impending disruption. Between no other countries was there immediate bitterness of spirit. The rest were prepared, but anxious and reluctant. So, arguing from reasons, it seemed as if our brethren must manage to localize the war. For England, France, and Russia to fight Austria, Italy, and Germany because the Austrian Serbs are unruly and the Archduke Ferdi- nand was assassinated seemed too preposterous to happen. It is in- credible that it should happen. But wars spring out of conditions 6 THE WAR, WEEK BY WEEK far deeper than the immediate causes. Germany is a great and ambitious miHtary power with im- portunate desires and an immense- ly expensive army. The condi- tion of Europe, sweating under an enormous armament, the Triple Alliance and the Triple Entente watching one another with weap- ons ready, was a condition of long-standing strain and very un- stable balance. Somehow, some- time, Europe has got to have relief from such expenditures for armament as she has been carry- ing; somehow, it would seem, there must come to be, vir- tually if not nomiinally, the United States of Europe, with a central authority strong enough to keep CAUGHT IN A TRAP 7 order in the whole European family. As it is, with the Alliance and the Entente, Europe was organized for a huge civil war. Must that come, and vast destruction with it, before the members of the Euro- pean family can reach a larger understanding and submit to the regulation of the family council? Our States split, fought, and joined again; but, slavery gone, there was comparatively little to hinder their reunion. There is vastly more to keep the nations of Europe apart — repulsions of race and traditional hatreds without num- ber, and the family interests of rulers, titular and actual. Still, half a loaf is better than no bread, 8 THE WAR, WEEK BY WEEK and a modified and regulated inde- pendence may seem preferable to destruction. Especially it may seem so after a great war. To fight, to suffer, if need be to die for something dearer than life and worth more, is one form of human satisfaction and the quarrel with it has no very tenable grounds. But to fight and suffer and die merely that the pro- cesses of civilization may hunch along by another jolt is pretty tedious, and the doubt if civiliza- tion is advanced by vast, wholesale wars makes it more so. The end of all wars is peace on a better basis, and the clearing away of obstacles to the development of the peoples CA UGHT IN A TRAP 9 whose development shows the most promise. The last big war in Europe gave Germany an Emperor and France a President. The next may give Germany a President, and to Rus- sia commission government, and to Austria heaven knows what, for tradition, when the smoke clears away, may be found among the dead on the field. Nobody can guess what will come in the wake of such a war as now seems under way; nobody can say whether there will be a crowned head left in Europe. All anybody can safely assert is that a vast treasure will be consumed, and that tens of thou- sands of the best lives in Europe will go out. lo THE WAR, WEEK BY WEEK This enormous topic puts all ordinary topics deep in the shade. Watching Europe is the ruling oc- cupation in these States at this writing, and it is a pretty lively job, especially for thousands of people who have friends traveling abroad, and who want mightily to know what is happening to them and how they are to get home. Our government is taking thought actively about them, of course, but war is not polite, and does not always wait for non- combatants to get out of the way. Our friends in England we think of as safe. About our friends in France we shall think with more anxiety until we hear further. CAUGHT IN A TRAP ii There is a great food problem coming, and great money problems. So far the chief function of these States in relation to the threatened suicide of Europe has been to assist the intending decedent in turning his effects into cash. But if the threat is to be carried out there will be fiscal transactions to conduct that will call for the highest avail- able skill, and that has stirred again the demand for Mr. Warburg on the Federal Reserve Board and the prompt completion of that board so that it may proceed to business. If all Europe is to be one tre- mendous moving picture of war it will be hard for us to keep our minds sufficiently on things at 12 THE WAR, WEEK BY WEEK home to do our necessary business here. School is keeping in Europe for all mankind while these ter- rific possibilities impend. We are prone to forget what sort men are ; prone to think they have become different; have risen above the possibilities of such behaviors as they once committed. But who, besides Mr. Bryan, and perhaps Mr. Carnegie, can think yet of civilization without wars? Men fight more politely than they used to, and are less cruel in retaliation and revenge, but there is as much fight in them as ever, and when the preventives of war and the sacri- fices to avert war and preparations for war have finally got too irksome to be endured, at it they go, ham- CAUGHT IN A TRAP 13 mer and tongs, and the best men win, presumably. At any rate, re- sults come in that way that do not come otherwise. If Europe must have an enor- mous revolutionary convulsion pre- ceding some new arrangement of her institutions and the relations of men, she will have it, and have it to a finish, and we who will look on must learn what we can and help as we may. GERMAN INTELLIGENCE ARE the Germans intelligent? Of course some of them are. Individuals of every pat- tern are intelligent. But the Ger- mans who have managed Germany for the last sixty years ; who believe, as Bismarck did, in blood and iron; who have made of Germany such a wonderful machine, have made her strong and rich and masterful, and are so intensely bent on securing for her all that may be coming to her — what of them? Are they intelligent now? Everybody seems to feel that u GERMAN INTELLIGENCE 15 Germany might have stopped the war that Austria had started if she had really wanted to. Not on old Franz Josef, but on William the Prussian, is laid the responsibility for this war. The belief is that the management of Germany was ready for more of the great blood- and-iron tonic, and let the war come, and probably even en- couraged Austria to light the fuse. It looks so. "This time France must be finished so that she will make us no more trouble." That sentiment, frankly expressed by some of the German managers, is part of the formidable German motive, and along with it goes imperial, world- 1 6 THE WAR, WEEK BY WEEK gobbling purposes that it needs a large map even to discuss. Was it intelligent of the German management to want to finish France ? Between individual Frenchmen and individual Ger- mans there is not much ill will. They can get on together perfectly if conditions are favorable. The chief trouble between France and Germany since '71 has been Alsace and Lorraine, captured by Bismarck and dragged away over the French border. France must be finished because Bismarck carried her be- loved provinces off to his politi- cal harem, and she will go after them the first good chance. But nobody but the German management wants France to be GERMAN INTELLIGENCE 17 "finished/' England, Russia, It- aly, these States, all the rest of us, prefer France in the unfinished French state as heretofore. We want no German jailers in charge of her, no German flavors in her honorable dishes, no German admixture in her architecture. Wedo not want any made-in- Germany France. No, no, not any! It is not popular, this idea of ' ' finishing ' ' France. France is too valuable to be "finished." For one thing, she is charming. For another, she is a laboratory of civilization where experiments are made in government, in religion and irreligion, in cooking, in art. 1 8 THE WAR, WEEK BY WEEK in the regulation of the affections, in everything. Of course, to finish her is the idea not of the German people but of the German manage- ment. The German people would not gain a lap by finishing France. They probably prefer variety in the world, as the rest of us do, and like the picture better with France left French. But the German management is a different affair. It is no more a free agent than a locomotive engine. It has to run on the rails that have been laid down for it by Bismarck and the engineers before and since. It has got to hang onto Alsace and Lorraine, and get all it can where- ever it can get it, and stick to blocd and iron, and load up with arma- GERMAN INTELLIGENCE 19 ment, and plot to swallow Hol- land, and plot to swallow Denmark and Belgium, and plot a German pathway to the Mediterranean, and paint the map of the world the German color to the last possible peninsula and cape. The manage- ment is free only to acquire. It may not be merciful ; it may not be generous ; it may not even keep its word if its '* interest " conflicts with it. It may only be greedy and grab and rise up early to keep what it gets. It sounds like the story of the New Haven Railroad over again, doesn^t it? Can it be that the Kaiser is the Charles S. Mel- len of Germany? They say 20 THE WAR, WEEK BY WEEK France has only one joke; certain- ly autocracy has only one story. Live and let live seems to be a necessary rule of life, but it is a rule that autocracies can never keep. Their interests will always conflict with the let-live end of it; their existence is too precarious to risk a competition of strong neigh- bors; they must be, and take thought always to keep on being, the great trusts that are so strong that nothing can touch them, and that are able at any time to swal- low anyone that is inconveniently active in the same business. It is the old story again that the chain that binds the slave binds the master. Autocrats are no more free than autocratized people. GERMAN INTELLIGENCE 21 There is a "must" for Hapsburgs, a "must" for HohenzoUerns, and they must do it or quit. However, autocracy is a process. Some things are accomplished by it that could hardly come otherwise. Diaz was a process; Standard Oil has been a process; Mr. Morgan was a great process in some re- spects, and the German Empire could hardly have been organized in a mass-meeting. The empire was all right enough — a going concern of great efficiency and one of the leading assets of civilization. The German people are very valu- able folks ; nobody doubts it. But is their management up to the date? Is it intelligent with a current and contemporaneous intelligence, or is 22 THE WAR, WEEK BY WEEK it driving along unadjusted to its generation? That seems to be the great question whereof these great war movies now proceeding may have the answer coming in their films. The Germans are intelligent. In spite of the large detachments of intelligence from that country for the benefit of this one that followed 1848, there is plenty left. They are able and they are well trained. They will not like to tip out their board of directors and discharge their hereditary manager, the gen- ial and exemplary William Hohen- zollem. He is a good man of the kind and liked and respected. But if he is out of date what can GERMAN INTELLIGENCE 23 they do? If Germany is a mere HohenzoUern asset the creditors may get it, but if Hohenzollerns are a mere Hability of Germany they can be discharged. That is where France has the best of it. She fired her hereditary manager along about 1793, and has never had one since for long at a time, and since 1871 committees of her stockholders have run her business, and done fairly well. Never was anything so inter- esting as this war. They say that England may run out of news paper. Appalling! Any live per- son hereabouts would rather give up food than newspapers. The Evening Sun declares that, regard 24 THE WAR, WEEK BY WEEK being had to the means of trans- mitting the news, the week ending August 6th was "the most inter- esting seven days any generation of man has lived through. " Very likely; and the second act in the great drama may make the first act seem tame. We are getting the climax of materialism. One recalls reading lately with amusement mixed with sympathy the suggestion of Mr. R. A. Cram, reviver of the Gothic, that we are at the beginning of a new five-hundred-year period in which what we call ' ' modem civili- zation, " dating roughly from the fall of Constantinople in 1453, "will dissolve and disappear as completely as the Roman Empire GERMAN INTELLIGENCE 25 vanished at the first node after the birth of Christ." And, then, Mr. Cram suggested, we will get back the best of what was in "the great Christian Middle Ages." This idea seemed interesting though fantastic, but nothing seems fantastic any more, and it is ''a lead- ing banker" whom a newspaper quotes as saying, anent the collapse of the mechanism of exchange: '* We have been building up this delicate fabric for hundreds of years and we thought that it was in perfect working order and was sufficient to stand up under any contingencies. But it has broken down in a night and the world plunged into a condition like that prevailing in the Middle Ages." 26 THE WAR, WEEK BY WEEK The world may not be going all the way with Mr. Cram, but it has made quite a lurch in his direction. HOW TO MANAGE A CONTINENT IT is evident that the European method of running a continent is behind the times; so obvi- ously and fatally behind that it has come to terrible smash and in- volved everyone concerned in it in an incalculable disaster. The prin- ciple of this collapsed method has been every nation for itself with such help as it could attract, and the devil take Europe. There have always been combinations, but they have been temporary. There have been concerts of the powers and Ententes and Alliances 27 28 THE WAR, WEEK BY WEEK to preserve the balance of power, but nothing effective enough to permit any European nation to allow her powder to run low or miss the latest thing in guns and war material. Think what life in these States would be if they all had to arm and drill and carry guns against one another! Think of New York setting up to be boss of the family and maintaining a fleet in coalition with Connecticut and Rhode Island in rivalry with Massachu- setts and Maine! Think of the ambitions of Illinois to control the waterway to the Atlantic, and the anxiety of Missouri to keep clear the way to the Gulf ! Think of Texas with separate interests, of MANAGING A CONTINENT 29 California with still another set of needs and rivalries and an army and navy to back them! Think, for short, of hot water, and then of hotter water, and more of it, then of immense quantities of boiling water under pressure, and you will have an idea what this country would be if run on the European plan. Incidentally you will get a no- tion of what the American Civil War was fought to avoid, and of what the Monroe Doctrine was contrived to avert, and of the value to peace of the disposition that left Cuba her autonomy, that seeks now to open a path to independ- ence for the Philippines, and that has held off with scruples that 30 THE WAR, WEEK BY WEEK have been so much criticized from every sign of land-hunger in Mexico. If a great, preponderant power is to keep the peace in a continent it must not be selfish and it must be trustworthy, and it must respect minority represen- tation. Moreover, it must not be too free with its neighbors' land- marks. Napoleon tried to rear- range the landmarks of Europe, and they were too much for him. Bismarck took Alsace and Lor- raine and Schleswig-H o 1 s t e i n ; Austria grabbed Bosnia and Herze- govina and abolished the Sanjak of Novibazar. Behold the fruits of those larcenies! Enterprising European autocrats and their boards of managers must be MANAGING A CONTINENT 31 broken of their propensity to change the map and insist on blue or green peoples living in yellow or red districts. The European mind must learn the lesson that the American mind is born to — the lesson of a continental family made up of diverse individuals, actively competitive, but sub- missive to such limitations of in- dividual action as the integrity and prosperity of the family require. Autocracies, not peoples, have got Europe into its present fearful mess. Autocracies and their nar- row selfishness and their frightful blunders have fastened militarism on her and brought her to the brink of hell. She will come back, 32 THE WAR, WEEK BY WEEK but how can they come back? Surely they are all riding to a fall — Hapsburgs, Hohenzollerns and Romanoffs — for though Russia's lot is cast in with the democratic governments and their success may seem to promise that her present government will stand, she cannot escape a salvation that has become epidemic in Europe. She will get her share. HOW WE FEEL AND WHY SOMETIMES the clouds come up and gather black and threaten torrents, and then the wind changes and they blow away without a drop. So also with war-clouds. They have so often blown away without a gun fired. But not this last time. This time there has come war; not a mere single war, but a sudden cloudburst of wars that fairly beggars expectation in its menace. At this writing that is still about all we know. We have had the 3 33 34 THE WAR, WEEK BY WEEK furious blast that precedes the storm and watched the scurrying of wayfarers for shelter. We have seen the lightning strike in a few places, but the great destructive energies have not shown their power yet. There have been some thousands killed, perhaps — the news as yet comes very weak in detail — a few vessels sunk or cap- tured; but, as we write in the second week of disturbance, the chief destruction has been to con- fidence and commerce. It is as though Europe was afire. And so she is, and no one putting out the blaze, but the available mili- tary population of six countries running to add to it, and more expected. HOW WE FEEL AND WHY 35 What we know who write is that enormous levies of trained soldiers are on their way to great battles. We know the Belgians, to the wonder of onlookers, have checked the German advance through their borders, and nicked with an im- pressive and cheering gash the prestige of "invincible Germany." We know nothing worth mention- ing about the English and German fleets. We know that Europe is full of our friends and neighbors, caught in the great conflagration, and not able as yet to escape from it. But the edges of the picture are all as yet that we can see. The center is veiled still. No doubt our readers of this issue will have seen some of it. We think of them 36 THE WAR, WEEK BY WEEK a good deal as one thinks of people who have had a look-in on the Judgment Day. The unanimity of sentiment in this country against Germany is surprising. It is not anti- German, and it is not pro-English. It seems to be a judgment given promptly and spontaneously on the merits of the case as seen by American eyes. As a people we have come in the last fifty years to be almost as near kin to the Germans as to the Eng- lish. We respect the German ability and value German friend- ship; nevertheless, the American mind records and discloses with hardly appreciable dissent the impression that the English, HOW WE FEEL AND WHY 37 French, and Russians are fighting in this war in behalf of the liberties of all the world, and that Germany and Austria are seeking to impose on the world a despotic authority to which it would be ruinous to yield. For fifteen years in this country a steady fight has been going on against commercial despotism. It has been a hard fight, the harder because it has seemed to many to be a fight against efficiency. We think we have won it, and we hope that in the long run the result will prove not to be prejudicial to efficiency. But however it may turn out, this fight against powers that were, and seemed indomitable, has perceptibly trained and edu- cated the American mind. In 38 THE WAR, WEEK BY WEEK many particulars we think differ- ently from what we thought fifteen years ago. What was radical opinion then is public opinion now. We have thrown off the yoke of the railroads and the trusts that had dominion over us. How we shall get along without the guidance they were used to give us we do not know, but we not only hope to get along without the harm to our- selves that would inevitably result from serious harm to them, but hope that in the end they will prosper better and be more service- able from having been put in their place. Germany, with her stout insist- ence on having her "place in the HOW WE FEEL AND WHY 39 sun," no matter who must be crowded out of it, has seemed to Americans to personify the com- mercial despotism that they have fought long and finally beaten at home. Her word to Europe and all the world has been, "I shall have what I want, and I have the power to take it." With that spirit in control of her government and people she has forced arma- ment on armament on all her neighbors and compelled them to the conclusion that there would be no peace until it had been settled by arms whether Germany or the rest of Europe was the stronger. As to that, we shall know in due time, but the instant Europe wins, if she does win, it will be a case 40 THE WAR, WEEK BY WEEK like our case of the railroads and the trusts. To destroy them would be only a shade less bad than to be ruled by them. Ger- many is a very important spoke in the wheel of civilization. The moment it has been drubbed into her that she is not the whole wheel it will be necessary to help her with such repairs that she can go on with her work. As much as these States are anti-German because Germany seems to need the illu- mination of defeat, so they will be pro-German just as soon as she has had her lesson. As for the Slav peril, which Professor Miinsterberg and Pro- fessor Richard make so much of, there are very few shivers running HOW WE FEEL AND WHY 41 up American backs on account of that. The Slav peril is remote; the German peril was imminent, and Europe was justified in taking counsel from the copy-book and doing the next thing. A great war is a great paci- ficator of squabbles. This one in Europe has pitched the Ulster disturbance out of court and made the militants negligible. Nobody in England has time to bother with invented troubles and hos- tilities when real ones press so hard on British energies. It is a good deal so with our minor diffi- culties. There couldn't be a great railroad strike. It was no time for it. So the railroads agreed to 42 THE WAR. WEEK BY WEEK unacceptable terms of arbitration. There was no time for any more fooling by hostile Senators over the Federal Reserve Board, so Mr. Warburg was confirmed and the Board completed by the appoint- ment and acceptance of Mr. De- lano. Mr. Warburg, by the way, is a German product, not very long out of Hamburg and only lately naturalized; and yet, though gen- eral sentiment is so strongly against the German Government in the war, there seems not to have been a voice raised against Mr. Warburg as a near-German. VOICES PERSONS who are in the habit of talking acceptably to the general public, and have acquired the advertisement incid- ent to that privilege, can make themselves heard, and are heard gladly, even in a din of war. The more the din and the bigger the babel of unidentified cries, the more acceptable is the sound of the voices that are familiar. Not many German voices are familiar here except those Germans or German-Americans who are re- sident in this country and speak 43 44 THE WAR, WEEK BY WEEK in English. Professor Munster- berg, of Harvard, has long-stand- ing habits of public admonition. We have heard abundantly from him since war began, and fully also from Professor Ernst Rich- ard, of Columbia. Both of these gentlemen chide us for our feeling that Germany needs to be dis- ciplined; both of them offer us pictures of her as the long-suffering defender of civilization and bul- wark of Europe against the insurg- ing Slav. Neither of them seems to feel that in Germany, as often happens elsewhere, prosperity has outrun manners. Voices from England come over the cables. We have had the more or less familiar tones of John VOICES 45 Jay Chapman, shocked at being shoveled upon a train and herded out of Germany, recounting ''the awe-striking brutaHty of actual war," the disappearance in the handling of American refugees of ''every decency existing in soci- ety,'* proclaiming that "the fu- ture of free government of the modern world is now being safe- guarded by blood and treasure by Britain" as it was in the days of Napoleon. We have had a remarkable voice from the dead, a vision of Tolstoi brought to notice and repeatedly reprinted, in which he foretold "the great conflagration" starting in 1 91 2 and developing into a destructive calamity in 191 3, with 46 THE WAR, WEEK BY WEEK all Europe in flames and bleeding and filled with the lamentations of huge battlefields. Out of the North, Tolstoi said, would come in 1 91 5 a strange figure, not a gen- eral, but a writer or a journalist, in whose grip most of Europe would remain until 1925. Finally would come a new political era for Europe, the end of empires and kingdoms, and the federation of the United States of Nations to hold the world for the four great giants — the Anglo-Saxons, the Latins, the Slavs, and the Mongo- lians. And another voice from the dead is Napoleon's: "In another hundred years Europe will be all republican or all Cossack." Through the World George Ber- VOICES 47 nard Shaw has expounded, what seem to him, the defects in the deportment of the British Govern- ment towards Germany. Bernard would have thrown a good scare into Germany in time to give her warning of what to expect. Through the World also has come the liveliest voice of all, H. G. Wells, vSure of what he has to say and saying it with penetra- tion; sure that "the monstrous vanity that was begotten by the easy victories of 1870-71" has come to its inevitable catastrophe ; sure that "never was a war so righteous as is the war against Germany now,*' glad it has come, glad to be in it, and keen to save 48 THE WAR, WEEK BY WEEK the Germans when they have had their Hcking. Twice Wells has called out to us. In his second vociferation he is sure that the Belgian check prefigures how the war is going, and proceeds to the subdivision of Europe with a view first to save Germany and next to make the rest of Europe politically comfortable. He does it with intelligence, so that one hopes that when the Powers get around to this duty of map-mak- ing they will call in Mr. Wells and get his views. Of course, though, there may not be any available Powers left when the fighting stops. In that case what's to hinder Brother Wells from mending the map himself! VOICES 49 ''A writer out of the North," Tolstoi said," is to have Europe in his hand for ten years!" There's your chance, Brother Wells. Mr. Kipling must be talking to himself. His voice at this writing is still inaudible. And though Chesterton must be talk- ing, up to this time of writing he has not talked over the cable. But, heavens! How he must be thinking 1 THE DREAM OF DOMINATION OUR President has solemnly exhorted us all to keep our shirts on in the great existing crisis in human affairs and not to talk loud, and not to be partisan, but strictly neutral. We are going to. We are sin- cerely the friends of all those parties who are scrapping. There is not one of them that we do not yearn to benefit. We do not intend to meddle in their fight, except to help them stop when the time comes, and to bind up what wounds we can reach, and 50 THE DREAM OF DOMINATION 51 carry food, perhaps, where it is needed. But, inasmuch as all of us read and some of us think, we are bound to have opinions on the merits of the controversy and hunches as to who ought to win and who is going to. In our be- havior we must be neutral to a hair's breadth; but if in our minds and feelings we had no preferences in such a conflict and thought only of how it affected ourselves, we should be a good deal duller and more selfish people than we are. And behold ; all of us but a little band of German-born defenders of Germany seem to feel that it is for the interest of civilization that Germany should be beaten in this war. We cannot see the welfare 52 THE WAR, WEEK BY WEEK of mankind in the domination of Europe by the kind of Germany that has been making in the last forty years. In this country we believe in democracy, and are committed to a great experiment with it. But if the Germany of Bismarck and the Kaiser is right and working on the right track by the right means, then we are wrong and proceeding in delusion, and our experiment will come to grief. If Bismarck and the Kaiser are right, blood and iron, militarism and autocracy, the strong hand and the mailed fist are the great tools of civilization. But not with such tools can democracy hope to suc- ceed. Its hope is all in justice and a fair deal, backed, no doubt, by THE DREAM OF DOMINATION 53 armed men, but not dependent for its prosperity on armed aggression. What do we think of Germans? Consider what we think of them as immigrants in this country. Consider our anxieties about the annual throng of newcomers that passes through our ElHs Island gate. Dubious material for a democracy so many of them seem. But about Germans there has never been a misgiving. They have always been welcomed as a strengthening stock. Always wherever there has been a settle- ment of Germans it has been felt to be a settlement of people able to take care of themselves and to maintain, and in some respects 54 THE WAR, WEEK BY WEEK improve, our standards of life. Certainly we have no antipathy to Germans; no racial distrust of them. But we do distrust the leading that Germany has had since 1870. We do consider that her people have been trained to follow a false ideal. We do consider that the policy of Bismarck corrupted her moral sense. A great man was Bismarck and a great deal good, but he lied without scruple, and he took for Germany without scruple or regard for justice anything that he thought would do Germany good. When he took Alsace and Lorraine he overdid the job and committed his unfortunate country to a hopeless debauch of militar- THE DREAM OF DOMINATION 55 ism. Germany as we see it now is not the Germany of Goethe or Schiller, of the democrats of 1848; it is the Germany of Bismarck, and of intense commercialism, and of success at any price. When Bismarck told in his memoirs how he changed the wording of the French ambassador's letter and brought on the war in 1870, it was notice given to mankind that in diplomatic concerns the word of Germany may not be trusted. When the German troops crossed the Belgian frontier it confirmed the existing impression that pro- mises of the German Government are only good so long as enforce- able by the promisee. To Ameri- cans who did not understand the 56 THE WAR, WEEK BY WEEK spirit and morals of the German Government, the invasion of Bel- gium brought a shock something like the shock that came two years ago when the Outlook disclosed the theory of the three cups of coffee. Something important seemed to crumble. Germany stood revealed as, governmentally, a vast and ruthless commercial organization, bound by no scruple, committed to the belief that might is the only right, and ready to crush and de- stroy any obstacle in her path. Nothing is comparable in im- portance to the Germans with be- ing detached from that terrible dream of domination. Their teachers and government seem THE DREAM OF DOMINATION 57 to have an obsession that un- less the Germans take charge of the world and give orders to all its peoples the world will go to pot. They are sincere, apparently, in the belief that the Slavs will bite the head off of civilization unless the German war lord can bite the head off of the Slavs. But the Slavs are a numerous and husky people, fairly good stock, and coming along fast. It is conceivable that the Almighty intended that they, too, shall have a place in the sun. There is lots of room for them, especially in Asia. Why this urgent necessity to bite off their so numerous heads? Is it that the world from the German point of 58 THE WAR, WEEK BY WEEK view has only two kinds of nations — those whom she can thrash, and those who might thrash her? Is it an essential part of the militar- istic conception that everybody on earth must some time be fought and, if possible, thrashed? Is it that terrible obsession that has left Germany without one zealous friend in all the earth and with only one ally in Europe? We people of the United States seem to be the best friends she has in the world, the most solicitous for her true welfare, the most anxious to save the pieces of her if she gets broken. But we don't like her militarism, nor believe in her theory that the Teuton is the Only Hope. It is no vital defect in her THE DREAM OF DOMINATION 59 people, but a dreadful misdirec- tion of leadership that has got her, as we see it, into a war in which defeat will be disaster but victory would be ruin. Yes, ruin infalli- bly; for there is not room on earth for the Germany of the Kaiser's hopes and Bismarck's purposes. There is no place, no possible toleration, for a super- man nation that would dominate mankind. The Germans must be content to be good people, living among good people and polite to them. That is the best that the future offers to any nation. WILL THEY GET TO PARIS? WITH the din of Europe continuously in our ears our poor affairs at home get but a slight hearing. Europe is in the condition of a village with a mad dog careering up and down its main street. We read day by day, and many times a day, of the Germans creeping nearer to Paris, and wonder if they will get there. When the Allies stand them off somewhere the hearts of most of us rise a little; when the Allies get a setback our hearts sink. Then we feel that Lord Kitchener is 60 WILL THEY GET TO PARIS? 6i probably right in forecasting a war that will go over the winter — per- haps two winters, perhaps three. What seems unthinkable is Europe with the German foot on her neck : Belgium absorbed, France pros- trated and Germanized, England subdued — our turn to come next. Are there Germans enough to accomplish that? One cannot think it. It is conceivable that Paris may be taken, but while England has a navy and Russia an army, how can Germany dictate terms to Europe? Nothing that she has accomplished so far is incompatible with her final un- doing, but, as Kitchener says, it may take time. There are those who hold that 62 THE WAR, WEEK BY WEEK Germany is unbeatable ; that she is so superior in the military art and in war power as the result of forty years of close devotion to those details that she can go out and take anything she wants from nations powerless to defend their own against her. President G. Stanley Hall, of Clark University, in Worcester, has put this idea into words as clearly as anyone. Ger- many's war personality now in con- trol of her, he says, is Nietzsche's; a worship of power, whereof the ethics is: "Do, be, get every- thing you have the strength to do. Pity is a vice. Evolution means the survival of the fittest and the destruction of the unfit. Chris- tianity with its sympathies for the WILL THEY GET TO PARIS? 63 poor in spirit means decadence — was a disease. The worid belongs to those who have the might to get it, and treaties, peace-pacts, arbi- tration, are mere points of strategy to deceive other nations." This philosophy. Dr. Hall says, has taken a deeper hold of the German mind than any other ever has since Hegel. A large proportion of Germany's ablest men have done nothing but study war, and that so secretly that the other nations of Europe have been taken unawares. The war, so far, fol- lows Bernhardi's book, and pro- bably will to the end, barring accidents. No power, Dr. Hall thinks, could resist Germany's five and a half millions of armed 64 THE WAR, WEEK BY WEEK men, trained to the last point of warfare. Perhaps not, but most of us Americans will live, barring acci- dents, to see. If Germany's controlling mind has been formed by Nietzsche and her hands taught to make his theories good, then in very truth a mad dog is loose in the main street of Europe. But what happens to mad dogs? They give the villagers a frightful scare; they bring death to some, but in the end, poor creatures, if they are not killed they die of their disease. Nietzsche's philosophy and mili- tarism are fatal diseases. In so far as Germany has got them she WILL THEY GET TO PARIS? 65 will die. There is death in them, not life. It is impossible that this Niet- zsche rabies runs all through Ger- many. It will have to be localized and expelled. Dr. Hall's conclu- sions are not to his own liking. He does not wish to see them come true, and if he is a prudent man he will hedge on them. If he can find some one to give him fair odds against the proposition that the meek shall inherit the earth, let him bet a little something on the meek. They are a much better risk than Dr. Hall seems to think. A deep principle of hu- man life works for them im- mutably, and once they start fighting they are liable to keep 66 THE WAR, WEEK BY WEEK at it in their modest way for a long time. The Nietzsche-Bemhardi theory is incredible to ordinary people. They think it is a crazy man's joke. But once they learn it is real, there is nothing to do but beat it or die. Life in a Nietzsche-Bern- hardi world would not be worth living. At this writing, after what the Belgians have done and are doing, and with what the French are doing for themselves, and with what the stubborn English are doing to help them, and with those loud thumps by Russia at Germany's back door, things do not seem to justify Dr. Hall's fears. WILL THEY GET TO PARIS? 67 If the Germans have become detached for the time from their Christian inheritance and are ac- tuated just now by Nietzsche- Bernhardi philosophy, there is no use of making so much re- monstrance about dropping bombs in Antwerp. Of course they will drop bombs anywhere they seem likely to put the unfit out of commission. If they have gone back to first principles we must expect a war more like what war was before first principles were modified. General Miles says this will probably be the last great war. No doubt it will be the last great war for the present. One of the discouraging things about schools is that the instructed 68 THE WAR, WEEK BY WEEK scholars are continually getting out of them and green ones coming in. It is the same about nations and war. The generation that knows about war is constantly dying and being replaced by a gener- ation that has to be taught. If this is to be the last great war for a long, long time it will have to be followed by a prodigious rearrange- ment of Europe. And no doubt it will be, however it comes out. Meanwhile we have the German apologists holding forth about the Slav peril, and the German armies using every means to kill or dis- able all their natural allies against the Slav. That is the way the Nietzsche philosophy works. Re- lying solely on aggression, it im- WILL THEY GET TO PARIS? 69 putes aggressive intentions to all its neighbors and takes such pre- cautions against them as to force all the neighbors to band together to save their lives. Of course this immense dis- turbance of the world is going to affect us in all our interests and in our politics. Our fiscal machinery is very much upset, our markets are disarranged; a great many of our workers have already lost employment; we are going to see high prices for food and diminution of the wages fund. The great German workshop for the time being is dead. Nothing that we have been used to send to it can go; nothing we have been 70 THE WAR, WEEK BY WEEK used to get from it can come. The other workshops of Europe are also very much disarranged by the drawing off of so many men to war. These considerations will affect our politics very promptly. In hazardous times partisanship lags, and folks want safe men in charge. We want the full ability of the country to be at the service of the Government, and a government ready to avail itself of the full ability of the country. It is no time for selfish politics. The world is afire, and our affair is to stand by with the best apparatus we can supply to help put out the blaze and save the burned-out people. BACKING AWAY FROM PARIS WAR is our apology to the animals for the way we kill them. When need calls hard enough, man takes his place in his turn in the line to the shambles. The story of Europe as it comes just now is too much like another tale of the stockyards by a superheated Upton Sinclair. The part of an American citizen con- tinues to be to sit in a chair where the breeze can reach him and read about killings. The reading is wonderfiil, but the part is not a glorious part, and one feels 71 72 THE WAR, WEEK BY WEEK ashamed at times not to suffer more and struggle more when anguish and struggle on such a stupendous scale are going on. Morning, noon, and night we read about it in our newspapers. We are fascinated by the story, so unreal, so portentous, so tremend- ous. Whatever our work is, it becomes a routine that we go through with perfunctorily and drop when it is done to go back to the great war serial of which there is a fresh installment twice a day. This is "the Day" which German officers in wardrooms of battle- ships and messrooms of army headquarters have stood up to drink to these many years past. How is it going? BACKING AWAY FROM PARIS 73 Not yet, after forty days of fighting, is there any outcome that seems decisive as to the result. The furor Teutonicus of which we have had warning from Professor Richard has all its cylinders in action. The Germans, said Dr. Richard, in the Outlook y "are de- termined to win at any cost, and after their victory to leave their enemies in such shape that they will never be able to disturb the peace again. " That expresses the underlying purpose of this war — the annihilation of all obstacles to Germany's supremacy in Europe. What we learn of the proceedings in France indicates that it is being pressed with an energy altogether prodigious and unprecedented in 74 THE WAR, WEEK BY WEEK warfare. But there is a counter movement going on, not quite so energetic, but remarkably reso- lute and considerably effective, to leave the Germans in such shape that their neighbors in Europe may give due attention to the rational enjoyment of life. Un- happily, this involves digging a vast number of Germans under the ground, and by the accounts we get the preliminaries for that rem- edy are being faithfully attended to. The Germans have made a wonderful advance on Paris, but they have met such a skillful and stubborn resistance, and suffered, apparently, such enormous losses that the question is, how many of them are left? What we won- BACKING AWAY FROM PARIS 75 der is, How long can they keep it up, and can they finish France and England before Russia btirsts through their back door? Hereabouts, frankly enough, we hope they can't, and our opinions follow our hopes. In spite of all the wonder of the German ad- vance, the Germans seem to us to be in a tighter place than the Allies. They can stand a wonder- ful lot of killing while they last, but are there enough of them? The furor Teutonicus undoubtedly has justified Dr. Richard's high opin- ion of it, but it cannot re-animate the dead. This war may be known in time, if anyone is left alive to write about 76 rilE WAR, WEEK BY WEEK it, as The Great Misunderstanding. Everybody concerned in it seems to have misunderstood. The Kaiser, strong for fattening peace and strong in his conviction that arma- ment would secure it, became the business partner of Herr Krupp, and gleaned his passing profit in the making of guns. His motives being misunderstood, the neigh- bors got the idea that he was pre- paring for war, and all stocked up forthwith and kept at it to the limit of their ability and beyond. Bismarck, the friend of Motley, a great deal wiser and kindlier man than, just now, he gets credit for being, misunderstood the French when he supposed that the defeat of 1870 would set easier on them if BACKING AWAY FROM PARIS 77 he relieved them of the care of Alsace and Lorraine. When it came to the pinch about Servia, the Kaiser and the war-lords seem to have misunderstood everybody : Russia in thinking she would back down if gruffly addressed, Eng- land in thinking she would grab at a ridiculous bribe and had no prejudice against infamy, Belgium in supposing she would merely whimper when trampled on, all of Europe and the rest of mankind in entertaining the astonishing idea that the nations were more afraid of Russia than of the Kaiser and his Krupps and the furor Teutoni- cus. Was ever there so misunder- stood and so misunderstanding a victim as the poor Kaiser! Our 78 THE WAR, WEEK BY WEEK heart bleeds for him. One would like to help him in his extremity. Would he care to have a gallant ex-naval officer who won renown once in a tight pinch and might be useful at Heligoland? Take him, Kaiser! Take our Hobson! Entirely at our risk as to him, though, of course, at your risk as to you. THE CASE OF THE KAISER THE chief blame for the war in Europe is laid here- abouts on the Kaiser. Maybe that is just, maybe not, but this seems apparent: that, whether the Kaiser did right or wrong, he did his duty as he saw it. One may think he did terribly wrong and yet acquit him of con- scious fault, of selfishness, of every thing but a misconception of the contemporary world and his part in it. The Kaiser does not believe in representative government for 79 8o THE WAR, WEEK BY WEEK Germany. He does not believe in democracy, at least not for Ger- many. Neither did Bismarck. Bismarck doubtless believed a good deal in Bismarck, partly as the agent of the Almighty, partly as Bismarck, director of the Ger- man people. Government of Ger- many by Bismarck through his Kaiser was representative govern- ment of a sort, for Bismarck in a way was representative. The Kaiser does not believe in that. He discharged Bismarck at once. He believes in government by the Kaiser as the agent divinely appointed to govern the German people. He is not responsible to the German people for what he does, but to the Almighty. He THE CASE OF THE KAISER 8i believes — he must believe — that he is competent to judge what is right for Germany and that when he does it he has God for his ally. That goes far to make him the resolute man that he is, but it makes him mighty dangerous. Of course he wants to do Germany good, for he is a devoted soul, and Germany is his duty and his ambition. Doubtless he would give his life for her; give it cheer- fully. The trouble with him and his theory is that in most of the affairs of men many heads are better than one. In spite of the craziness of mobs, in the long run, the sanity of many minds is more durable and less subject to delusion than the sanity of one 82 THE WAR, WEEK BY WEEK mind. The successful kings and emperors nowadays are persons employed by the people they nom- inally govern. Some of the em- ployed kings are very valuable and useful, but "divine right" rulers like the Kaiser, however good and able and sincere, are utterly out of date in forward-looking countries in this age of the world. To us who believe and hope in democracy the Kaiser seems a tragedy. He has hitched his wag- on to the wrong star. He is able, he is engaging, he is likeable, a good husband, a dutiful father, a good man. He would have made a tip-top Kaiser if only he could have got on a contemporary basis with the German people and THE CASE OF THE KAISER 83 realized that they should be his boss and not he theirs. Employed by them he might be useful, for they like him and he them, but an autocratic ruler for such a people as the modern Germans is an anachronism, and the probable fate of the Kaiser is to prove it so. The great destructive machine which he has spent his strength to perfect has got away from him, and is doing its appointed work of devastation. Where he will be, or in what case, when its wheels cease to turn no one can foretell. A COMPLAINT FROM THE KAISER THE complaintof the German Kaiser to our Mr. Wilson about the thousands of dum-dum bullets found in the French fort of Longwy affords affecting evidence of the Kaiser*s disposition to swallow what is handed to him. This is the Kaiser's first considerable war, and having had probably little practice in separating true news from false, he doubtless believes that all his good Germans have been behaving like gentlemen, and that the Belgians, French, and 84 THE KAISERS COMPLAINT 85 British have done many repre- hensible naughtinesses. In this country, where our minds are newspaper-fed, and where to cut a pack of lies and turn up the truth is an exploit done instinctively and repeatedly in the course of the day's reading, we have learned to take all reports of atrocities in war with allowances. Consider our recent war in Colorado, and the incident of the militia and the burning of the miner's camp. The various versions of that story contradict one another just as the versions of the story of Lou vain do. If Mr. Wilson should reply to the Kaiser's remonstrance, "Well, Kaiser, everybody's doin' it," that would indicate one way to deal with 86 THE WAR, WEEK BY WEEK atrocity stories. Either believe all you read from both sides or else reject all. But to believe all the tales of German cruelties and re- ject all the tales of anti-German cruelties is not intelligent. War is terribly cruel. It lets loose hordes of men, the bulk of whom are humane but including many who are not htimane. Moreover, war excites and intensifies the passions, and may brutalize even the kindly. It is not incredible that Belgian peasants, infuriated by their sufferings, took dreadful vengeance on wounded Germans. And, of course, it is not incredible that some Germans took terrible vengeance on helpless Belgians. When five or six million men are THE KAISER'S COMPLAINT 87 practicing to kill one another, why bother about these details or fret because some women and children and other non-combatants are killed? It is the war that is terri- ble, not these poor, dreadful inci- dents of it. To try to make war nice is poppy-cock. After we have read of trenches filled and fields heaped with dead young Germans at Liege, and with Ger- mans and Frenchmen and English- men along a line two hundred miles wide from Liege to Paris, this protest from the Kaiser about dum-dum bullets sounds like a joke. The poor Kaiser! The papers quote the late British General 88 THE WAR, WEEK BY WEEK Grierson, who had been military attache at BerHn, as saying of him: "He's all right; he's a gentle- man. But those around him are perfectly poisonous." Just how much hand, immedi- ately and personally, the Kaiser had in bringing on the war is not known yet, but a theory that com- mends itself to credulity holds the poisonous Prussian war party re- sponsible for getting Germany into this war while the Kaiser was off on his summer holiday in Norway. The proceedings as to the stiffening of Austria's backbone in her deal- ings with Servia were doubtless agreed upon before the Kaiser left his capital. Austria was to mobi- lize against Servia, but it seems THE KAISER'S COMPLAINT 89 to have been expected, and there seems to have been a supposition that it had been arranged that Russia would do nothing more than protest in Servia's behalf. But when Russia fooled this expecta- tion by mobilizing, the Kaiser was away, and then, apparently, the Crown Prince and all the fire- eaters rushed matters so hard that before the Kaiser could get back the country was committed to fight Russia. That meant France, too, and then, to Germany's horror, England joined them, leaving German diplomacy flat on its back and the war squad in control of everything. If that is a true story, and the Kaiser was thus caught in the 90 THE WAR, WEEK BY WEEK machinery he has so labored to create, still it was his machinery that caught him, and it all only illustrates the saying that those who live by the sword shall perish by the sword. The war news at this writing is all of a successful stand by the Allies in France on the line from Paris to Verdun, and the driving back of the Germans. But we only know generally what is going on. It is fight, fight, fight; a tremendous engagement of huge armies along a long line, with apparent advantage for the Allies. If the defenders merely hold their own in this fighting they are ahead. For the Germans to hold their own THE KAISERS COMPLAINT 91 is not enough. They must con- quer or get out. All the forecasts of students and predictions of prophets, seers, wiz- ards, witches, holy men, clairvoy- ants, and sooth-sayers have been widely published and have made interesting reading of late. We all want to see a little farther ahead than the unaided vision can pene- trate. Some attractive long-dis- tance prophecies have set Nov- ember as the month in which the Kaiser is to lose his empire. That may follow, of course, if this enor- mous battle between Paris and Verdun goes decisively against the the invaders and the Russian suc- cesses continue. 92 THE WAR, WEEK BY WEEK There is a pious beauty about the phrasing of the Httle proclama- tion in which President Wilson calls upon "all God-fearing persons" to pray on October 4th for the restoration of peace in Europe. It reads like a collect out of the Episcopal prayer-book. Europe's needs are urgent. It is to be hoped that she will not be past praying for on the first Sunday in October. THE PATHOS OF THE GERMANS NO doubt in our character as neutrals we ought to be as sorry as we can for everybody involved in the great war, without stopping to be over- nice in apportioning blame; sorry for the Kaiser because he has been caught in his machinery; sorry for France and England and Germany because, being considerably civil- ized, they should not be under the terrible cost and inconvenience of battling with one another; sorry for the Serbs, and for Austria 93 94 THE WAR, WEEK BY WEEK because she is such a back number; sorry most of all for the gallant Belgians who have suffered so much, and least perhaps for Rus- sia whom nothing can hurt very deep and whose chances of gain are biggest in proportion to what she risks. And coming to particulars, we ought especially to be sorry for the Germans. As we see them to-day they are a pathetic people. Ger- many has set up to be the bully of Europe, and a bully, when one has got over being mad at him, is always pathetic. Bullies are always stupid. At the bottom of their proceedings is inability to understand something very import- ant to be understood. They are PATHOS OF THE GERMANS 95 people who, seeing no chance to get what they want by favor, are constantly tempted to try to get what they can by force. That seems to be the case with the Germans. They have enor- mous merit of a most substantial kind, and it has brought them huge and well-earned gains; but when it comes to getting anything by favor there is nothing com- ing to them. In his present stage of development, the German is the fat man of Europe whom no- body loves. Individual Germans are beloved, of course, but the typical German not. A writer in the Outlook J an American of Ger- man parentage, writing in defense of his brethren, explains the uni- 96 THE WAR, WEEK BY WEEK versal distaste for Germans in Europe by saying: "The average German, whom the foreigner sees, is aggressive, self-assertive, loud in his manner and talk, inconsiderate, petty, pompous, dictatorial, without hu- mor; in a word, bumptious. He has, in many cases, exceedingly bad table manners and an almost gross enjoyment of his food ; and he talks about his ailments and his under- wear. His attitude toward wom- en, moreover, is likely to be over- gallant if he knows them a little and not too well, and discourteous or even insolent if he is married to them or does not know them at all. He is at his worst at the time when he is most on exhibition, when he is on his travels or helping other PATHOS OF THE GERMANS 97 people to travel, as ticket-chopper or customs official." This German apologist knows that underneath bad manners which the German does not know are bad are some of the greatest and best of human qualities, but casual observers don't like the manners and naturally don't like the man; so Germans, apparently, have been taught that every hand in Europe is against them, and that they must always expect to fight for what they get and thrash all comers. Hence militarism and all the troubles that follow it. A little while ago English man- ners were just as ill thought of, 98 THE WAR, WEEK BY WEEK and doubtless with just as good reason, as German manners are now; but English manners seem to have improved. American tourist manners do not edify all foreign observers, but bad man- ners in our tourists do not have political consequences. Refine- ment usually comes with pros- perity, and has come abundantly to Germans in the United States. German prosperity at home has mostly come within the last thirty years, and probably it would in time have brought manners in its train, and possibly as Germans grew to be more generally accep- table they would have emerged from this terrible idea that they must thrash all the world in PATHOS OF THE GERMANS 99 order to get their place in the sun. When prosperity will resume its refining course among the Germans in Germany heaven knows, but is not their situation sincerely pa- thetic? Not only are the manners of ordinary Germans open to such regretful criticism as above quoted, but the example set to ordinary Germans by their superiors in rank and power seems far from helpful. Professor Newbold, of Philadelphia, who fled through Germany the other day, is quoted in the papers as saying : "The war was caused by a little group of military men who aim at the conquest of the world. loo THE WAR, WEEK BY WEEK They are the most offensive people I have ever met. They are re- sponsible to no one for their ac- tions and they lit the fuse." But as to the mass of ordinary Germans whom he saw, he says: *'I never before saw such despair and misery written on the faces of people as I saw in Germany when war was declared. They felt and looked as though the end of the world had come." Be sorry for the Germans. They are in for a terrible time. At the bottom they are good and extremely able and valuable peo- ple, but they have been tied up to a wrong conception of what rules our modern world. If the war rids PATHOS OF THE GERMANS loi them of the domination of ** mili- tary men who aim at the conquest of the world," there is no reason why they should not grow in favor; but no country that all the others fear can hope to be popular in a modern world. A FOUNDLING THIS is distinctly a foundling war that is going on in Europe. Nobody is will- ing to father it. One after another the nations concerned have stood up and made formal declaration that it was no war of theirs, but an unwelcome charge left on their doorstep. It will take court pro- ceedings to trace its paternity, but persons who have duly read the papers, white and other kinds, incline strongly to the suspicion that the war is the love-child of the German General Staff. Nobody 102 A FOUNDLING 103 else in Europe seems to have wanted it, not even the Kaiser. The story that the Staff fooled him with a story that the Russians — or was it the French? — had crossed his frontier is just such another tale as that of Bismarck and the Kaiser's grandpa, and sounds so likely that we hope that in due time the German people will take the matter up with their General Staff and get the rights of it. If they conclude that the war was a mis- take for them and that the Staff got them into it on false pretenses, to hang so many of the Staff as they can catch would seem not to be out of the way. And perhaps there are professors left alive in Germany with whom 104 THE WAR, WEEK BY WEEK some settlement may be in pros- pect. When one considers what this war is for, the answer here- abouts is that it is to correct cer- tain obsessions that have grown up in the German mind as a conse- quence of wicked and erroneous philosophy and teaching. The gospel of force, of assault, of rob- bery, has been preached openly and effectively in Germany for a generation. Nietzsche preached it until his madness became uncon- trollable, and Treitschke, Von Sybel, Von Bernhardi, and heaven knows how many others. They got it into the more or less innocent German head that it belonged to the Germans to dominate the rest of mankind. To get that idea out A FOUNDLING 105 of the German head, out utterly and permanently, is what this great war is primarily about. Secondarily, it is a war against the whole idea of militarist domin- ation; a war against brute force; a war to keep the terrible obsession that has brought Germany and all Europe to so dreadful a pass from lodging in the mind of any other people for some time to come. It is not a war of the English to crush German trade ; not primarily a war of the French to get back their lost provinces; not a war of the Belgians to conquer Ger- many; not a war of Russia to get Constantinople; not a war of any- body for any detail of trade, or revenge, or advantage, but a war io6 THE WAR, WEEK BY WEEK of all hands to destroy militarism and the gospel of force, and bring peace and equity back into the world. It is a terrible job to beat the gospel of force and make peace universally popular. This present try at it seems to be going along as well as could be expected. The Nietzscheans are still extremely efficient. Rheims Cathedral, bat- tered and burned, now attests, along with Louvain, their savage competence in destruction. Cer- tainly the Vandals and the Huns had nothing on the Germans as destroyers of the monuments of beauty and of piety. Beaten back on the Marne, the Kaiser^s troops A FOUNDLING 107 are making, at this writing, a for- midable stand on the Aisne, where there has been a week's fighting, but as yet without decisive miH- tary results. The German rush is over, the Allies, having managed, like good shoppers, to avoid or survive it, are at it now, ding-dong, to get the idea of conquest out of the obsti- nate German head, preparatory to introducing there some less danger- ous conceptions of the duty and destiny of man. There seems to be going on a vast killing of men in France, not to mention the whole- sale operations in that line which we hear of on the other side of Germany. Truly a bad philoso- phy is a very fatal thing and io8 THE WAR, WEEK BY WEEK desperately hard to eradicate. If missionaries could have converted Germany to the paths of peace, that woiild have been the thriftier way, but what could missionaries have done when a large proportion of the Germans are abundantly religious and suppose that they are Christians already, and the rest don't want to be? Suggestions of peace have been made to our President, but amount to nothing as yet. Neither side is ready for them. The talk is still of a pretty long war in which settlement will be reached by pro- cesses of exhaustion. When it comes to that, the feeling of the Allies is that England and France A FOUNDLING 109 with control of the sea can stand more of it than harbor-bound Germany can; while Russia is inexhaustible. That is dreadful sounding talk, but, of course, it is a hard job to get the poison of a rotten philosophy out of the heads of a strong, obstinate, and very numerous people. Some devils come out, as the Scripture says, only by prayer and fasting. We are going to try prayer on a large scale on October 4th, and with fasting there has been much experi- ment in the field already, with very much more extended tests in prospect if the war continues long. Only long-distance predictions of this war's results have any no THE WAR, WEEK BY WEEK chance as yet. It has gone far enough now to prove that no one is to have an easy victory. The AlHes on the defensive seem able to stand off the Germans; the Ger- mans on the defensive seem able to stand off the Allies. It looks as though the German invasion of France was a failure, but the German defense of Germany, if it comes to that, promises to be a very hard nut for the Allies to crack. That is one thing that gives gravity to the talk of a long war. But speculation about these immediate details is futile. The mind dwells rather on the ultimate result to mankind of these tremen- dous forces of disarrangement. A FOUNDLING iii The most fantastic prophecies, like Tolstoi's vision and that queer seventeenth century prediction put out by Figaro J get attention because they range so far ahead. The future of the world has not, for a century at least, been so utterly uncertain. It is as Mr. Root said the other day at Ham- ilton College: ** This dreadful war, with its ter- rible destruction and misery, marks the end of an epoch and the begin- ning of a new day for the world. No man can tell just what the end will be. We are on the threshold of that new day in which the associations of men are taking new forms and new opportunities and are leaving behind everything that has gone before." 112 THE WAR, WEEK BY WEEK That is the point. Behind this awful cloud that obscures Europe there is something like a new hea- ven and a new earth, and we want to know what they will be like. This is not a war of hatreds. Hatreds may be bred in it, have been bred in it, especially in Bel- gium — but they did not cause it. What caused it was fears and obsessions. It is all a dreadful cautery of life to get the madness out of it. It even seems as if the nations that have kept out of it, especially Italy, are half anxious to get in for fear they will miss the treatment. Maurice Maeterlinck, a Belgian, says the Belgians must not forget A FOUNDLING 113 their terrible experiences nor feel presently that, after all, the mass of Germans may not be so bad. "We must be pitiless," he says; "the Germans are guilty in the mass ; they did what it was in them, and always will be in them, to do; they must be destroyed like wasps. Let there come a thousand years of civilization, of peace, with all refinements, the German spirit will remain absolutely the same as to-day, and, given opportunity, would declare itself tmder the same aspect and with the same infamy. " Maurice seems to be a good deal stirred up. Probably he has been to Louvain. But to destroy the Germans is too large a contract. Moreover, this idea that a whole 114 THE WAR, WEEK BY WEEK race of men s incurably impossible, though excusable in Maeterlinck for the moment, is a very mis- chievous idea. It is cousin to the idea the Germans seem to have cultivated about the Slav, and to their further notion that the Teu- ton is the Only Hope. But "Teu- ton" in the German mind includes all the races of Northern Europe — British, French, Belgian, Dutch, Scandinavian, Celt, and even Slav itself, unless it is too much mixed with infusions from Asia. The Germans have not professed a pious purpose to destroy even the Slavs "like wasps," and as to the Belgians, their professions about them were most polite. All the Germans want of the Belgians is A FOUNDLING 115 complete control of their country and their great port. They have not professed yet to see a need to exterminate the Belgians. Ger- manized and subjected to the direction and discipline of the German military caste, the Bel- gians might look pretty good to Germany. Of course that is what gives intensity to Maeterlinck's wrath and gives extension to the senti- ment that when the final settle- ment comes Belgiimi ought to have Berlin. The wonderful rush of the Ger- man armies from Belgium to Paris was immensely instructive. So were the reports of the exhaustion of the German troops when they li6 THE WAR, WEEK BY WEEK had reached the side-lines of Paris and had to begin to retreat. A terrible, terrible thing is the furor Teiitonicus; dangerous to all comers, but especially to Teutons. What will the survivors of those driven battalions of Germany think about it when they get home? They have seen the Juror Teutonicus at work; they have felt the drive of it; they have been subject to the orders of the agents of it; have been goaded by their swords, lashed sometimes across their faces by their whips. They have seen German lives spent as lives have never been spent before in Western Europe. They will know the terrible futility of that expenditure. What will they A FOUNDLING 117 think of the fiiror Teutonicus, of militarism, of government by a caste? Can they think? Can the com- mon Germans think? Or has the power to think been thrashed out of them under miHtary discipHne? THE UNSCRAMBLING OF EUROPE THE interesting thing ahead when the fighting is fin- ished is the unscrambling of Eiirope. The German mind takes no account of it. It is all for making Europe a great German trust, capitalized high enough to give a huge profit on the war, full of subsidiaries, and with "com- mon" and "preferred" and the other trimmings. The German idea is to do all that by main strength and then keep it done by main strength. The plan has all the charms that made the argu- Ii8 UNSCRAMBLING OF EUROPE 119 ment for our big trusts — economy and efficiency of administration, capacity to do large things on a large scale, and all that. All the small, independent concerns of Europe would be incorporated into the big German trust, and made fabiilously profitable to the owners by a perfected organization and the extirpation of competition. No more Belgium, no more Hol- land, no Switzerland, as little England as possible, a pared-down France, and a grand, gigantic Ger- many. But the English idea seems to be quite different. " We want this war to settle the map of Europe on national lines and according to the true wishes of 120 THE WAR, WEEK BY WEEK the people who dwell in the dis- puted areas. "After all the blood that is being shed we want a natural and har- monious settlement which liber- ates races, restores the integrity of nations, subjugates no one and permits a genuine and lasting relief from the waste and tension of armaments under which we suffered so long." So Winston Churchill, first Lord of the Admiralty, and what he says is a proper sentiment for England who cannot hope to oc- cupy this world by her unaided force, and has need of contented neighbors to work with. Part of the great problem will be to devise due possibilities of contentment for all the Germans except the UNSCRAMBLING OF EUROPE 121 military caste, and not even that can the AlHes shirk. There will be sixty-odd million very valuable Germans left when the war is over, and that is far too many people to be left with punctured hopes or without a satisfying vision of the future. Somehow matters must be handled so that in twenty years Germans will say: "After all, it was a good war for us. It delivered us from militar- ism and Pan-Germanism and left us free to live and work and trade in a world no longer unfriendly.** This war is an enormous process of civilization, and it is as a process that we should look at it — a pro- cess that came inevitably out of 122 THE WAR, WEEK BY WEEK the preparations made for it and the defects in the world -arrange- ment that preceded it. We ought to feel confident that out of all the killing and destruction that is going on, ideas and considerations and concessions will come to birth that will be worth the terrible cost and anguish of the accouchement. There is a German point of view that, with all its unconscionable terrors and brutalities and its dreadful entanglement with mili- tarism and the gospel of force and Prussian Junkerism, is not all non- sense. These Germans that are being killed by regiments ought to be carrying their civilization to the parts of the world that need it, As far as it goes, it is a wonderful UNSCRAMBLING OF EUROPE 123 civilization, and the made-over world that is coming must provide markets for all that is good in it. For that matter, the world that was before the first of August was open enough, amply open, to the German civilization. It was only closed to German sovereignty, which could not spread except by trespassing on premises already in hands competent to resist tres- pass. German civilization was wel- come almost everywhere. German sovereignty was welcome almost nowhere outside of Germany. That it will be any more welcome after the war does not seem at all likely, but with the fear of Ger- man sovereignty dissipated, Ger- man civilization — meaning effi- 124 THE WAR, WEEK BY WEEK ciency, patience, and order — may be more welcome in the earth than ever. Meanwhile it is all the prelimi- nary details of the process that interest us; the details of the fighting. That goes on at this writing on the line of the Aisne with desperate fervency. The Allies refuse to be beaten; so do the Germans. The butcher's bill grows and grows; we know little about it, and cannot think much about it yet, because of the inten- sity of our concern about the issue. Clearly, the great plan to over- whelm France by a sudden on- slaught is a failure. If the invad- ers are to possess France they will UNSCRAMBLING OF EUROPE 125 have to earn and pay for every yard of it. But there is no pros- pect that they will possess it. The Germans on the Aisne are fighting for dear life, and all the time the rapping on the back doors of Berlin grows louder, and winter is coming on. Terrible stories come and persist about German atrocities in Belgium, including out- rage and mutilation of women. A letter published in the Sun, written to Harold M. Sewall, of Bath, Maine, is explicit and convincing as to this latter point. This dreadful development of morbid brutishness is perhaps a detail of the furor Teutonicus against which Professor Ernst Richard so lately warned the world. It must make 126 THE WAR, WEEK BY WEEK direful reading for the German apologists. The more thoughtful people have had no real vacation this year. August is the vacation month, and since August first we have all been to school every day, Sundays included, learning the military art and the history and geography of Europe. Among other things, we have fought over again the chief battles of our own Civil War for our better under- standing of the proceedings in France. There has been no peace, no rest. Where we have not been harrowed by enormous battles, vast destruction, and huge mortality, we have been ruminating about the UNSCRAMBLING OF EUROPE 127 immediate future of mankind. It is as though all bets were declared off and all precedents became in- valid on August first, and a new time began on that date, to which the calculations that had come to be our habit no longer applied. The jar of this transition is enor- mous, even here, where we are shielded by distance from the griefs and material distress that accompany it. Our friends are not dead, nor in special peril; no consuming disaster hangs over us, and yet most of us Americans are depressed, some consciously, some without knowing why. You can't read war and think war all the time for two months without feeling the strain of it. 128 THE WAR, WEEK BY WEEK No; thoughtful people this year got only so much real vaca- tion as they had in June and July. LET US TURN OUT OUR POCKETS WE ought to get into this European war harder. Since it is not proposed that we shall fight in it, we ought to get into the rescue work with more power. Some of us are doing something, but most of us are doing nothing and not enough is being done. Not enough money is coming out for the Belgians, whose terrible plight is so pro- foundly appealing. Not enough for the Red Cross. One trouble is that we have war troubles of our own; that because of upsets, due 9 129 130 THE WAR, WEEK BY WEEK to war, in many lines of business, an unusual proportion of our own people are in more or less pecu- niary distress. Another trouble is that when six nations in Europe are spending their utmost energies to kill, what even a large country, three thousand miles away, can do to save must seem almost trivial. Still, we ought to do more; we must do more. No other invest- ment offers such returns as the succor of the Belgians, so many of whom, woeful to tell, are beyond aid already. Come, brethren, let us turn out our pockets at least. The special appeal now to us is for the Bel- gians and the French of Northern France; the regions where the war TURN OUT OUR POCKETS 131 has gone. What terrible cries will come later and from where no one can tell. In Austria there must be great distress, but Austria and East Prussia and Poland are not so near our door as Belgium is. The only safe place for Belgian non-combatants now seems to be England, and there they have gone by thousands and are being cared for by the English. No doubt our great part in this vast disturbance is to mind our own business and keep our general apparatus of production and dis- tribution going for the benefit not only of ourselves, but of all Europe. But though to mind our jobs is useful, it does not ease our hearts much. Lucky anybody 132 THE WAR, WEEK BY WEEK who can go over there and help. Lucky anybody who has much to give and gives it. Those who have not much to give should pinch and give more than they can. That is better than to be left out of this war. It is not brotherly to stay out. The interminable battle on the Aisne still, at this writing, rages on indecisively, apparently with enormous loss of life. We are told now to call it, not a battle, but a campaign. Other huge campaigns are going on to the east of Ger- many, where the Russians seem to have the better of it, and where also enormous losses attest the ef- ficiency of modern war machines. TURN OUT OUR POCKETS 133 It makes for detachment from life to watch these tremendous proceedings. It seems ignoble, and it is, to cling over anxiously to life when daily so many thou- sands before our eyes give it up. This is our battle, too, that is being fought in Europe; our des- tiny as well as their own that Bel- gians, British, French, Germans, and all the rest are struggling and dying over. This is a conflict of fundamental ideas. If the Ger- man idea wins, its next great clash seems likely to be with the idea that underlies such civiliza- tion as we have in these States. In some ways we are slack, and it might not be altogether bad for us to have the German goad scar our 134 THE WAR, WEEK BY WEEK easy-setting hides. Read how the German peril has turned Enghsh Aldershot into a factory for turn- ing soft islanders into athletes. A very efficient instrument is the German goad, and wonderful things it seems to have done for Germany. There is a large pro- portion of unused energy in most people; the use of the German goad is to bring it all to applica- tion. Nature's goad is hunger, but that is not enough to carry civili- zation very far. The German goad undertakes to cover the whole distance that civilization has to go; to prod the whole world into a huge productiveness and all siirviving mankind into fabulous efficiency. That is the idea that TURN OUT OUR POCKETS 135 is now being discussed in Europe. It has come to the point where the nations have to settle whether they will accept the German idea and try to be like Germany, or reject it and demonstrate that it is unsound. What is the matter with it? It looks lovely to the Germans, and in great measure it has agreed with them wonderfully. They tell you that the army and military train- ing is the very hub of their wheel ; that it has made Germany what she is ; that it is the greatest thing in the world, and that to force it on the world is to confer on the world the greatest possible blessing. Well, Germany has conferred 136 THE WAR, WEEK BY WEEK this blessing very considerably on Europe in the last forty ^^ars, and Europe in her deep perversity declines to like it. She wants to be rid of it. Perhaps she doubts that military training is the great- est thing in the world. There have been folks who said that love was. Germany has not bothered much with love, but she is undeni- ably strong in military training. There is so much good in the German discipline that people were almost ready to believe it was all good. Since the war came that inclination has weakened. The in- vasion of Belgium weakened it; so did Louvain; so did Rheims; so did the terrible harrying of the Belgians; so did the unanimity TURN OUT OUR POCKETS 137 with which nearly all of Europe and the United States have taken, some actively, some as neutrals, the negative side in the argument. The feeling grows that the German idea, with all its immense good, makes for mania, and would ulti- mately, if it ran on, produce a crazy world, bereft of its jewels, with battles forever running in its head, and huge wars forever in preparation. So the discus- sion runs very high. When it is over the question will come up what to substitute for the German idea that will possess the valuable disciplinary facilities of that sys- tem without its dangerous ten- dency to produce military mania. After all, efficiency isn't every- 138 THE WAR, WEEK BY WEEK thing. It isn't the chief end of man, nor even his main business on earth. His main business on earth is to Hve, except when, on occasion, as now, the main busi- ness of very many men becomes, temporarily, to die. GERMAN "KULTUR** AND THE PRUSSIAN IDEA GERMANY'S purpose in the great war, as seen from here, is to teach a reluctant world that what the German Kaiser says goes. It is a war for the vindication of the Prussian say-so; a war of destruc- tion and extermination of what- ever stands up against Prussian domination; a war to parcel out the world anew, and give Prussia what she wants. Prussia has dominated the rest of Germany so completely that it has forgotten 139 140 THE WAR, WEEK BY WEEK that there ever were ideas in Ger- many that were not Prussian. Undoubtedly Prussia is eager to dominate the rest of mankind in the same way, and morally cap- able of using any available means to do it. With the Prussian idea it is truly a case of world-power or downfall. It is an idea that is incapable of repose, that requires periodical exercise in the field, and must be fed on conquest if it is to keep its strength. That is not at all true of German *'kultur, " which we have so much been told the Germans are fight- ing to defend. The German "kultur** means pig-iron, Krupps, ships, beer, chemicals, music, discipline, military service, and ''KULTUR'' AND PRUSSIA 141 professors. It is the German civilization and includes the Ger- man attempt to discover, assimi- late, and apply knowledge and truth. This last needs very little defense by armies. It only needs time and peace. Given those, it will conquer the world, if it is good enough, and not a gun fired. Knowledge and truth are things for which, even in this world, there is plenty of room. Of habit- able land there is only a limited area on this planet ; good ports are scarce; all the ready-made farm- ing land in the better climates belongs to somebody capable of making trouble if ousted, but the more truth people get hold of, the more there is left; the more 142 THE WAR, WEEK BY WEEK knowledge is applied, the more awaits application. In so far as German "kultur"'was good, it had all the world to dominate, and no objection. In thirty years that domination had made vast pro- gress. But against the domina- tion of the Prussian idea the objection is so vital and intense that in the great world-rising against it there is only too much prospect that the breath of Ger- man "kultur" will be clean squeezed out of the German body. Krupps cannot do much for it; destruction and exter- mination — the erasure of beauty, the expulsion of piety — are not aids to it. It should be the ally of those things, not their foe. ''KULTUR'' AND PRUSSIA 143 Alas, then, for German "kultur, " ridden to its death by the ruthless Prussian demon; struggling splen- didly to do the demon's work, but fated, who can doubt, to sink in due time, gasping and bleeding, foundered by that fatal rider. The pity of it; oh, the pity of it! that what should be the world's ex- ample must figure as its warning; that this hell that is heating for the Saxons and Bavarians — kindly people both — is the kind of hell that awaits all people who fail to fight off Prussian domination before it has enchained them. It is a bad hell ; a hell of Krupps and ruined cities and violated women, and tears and misery and blood, and blackened fanes. 144 THE WAR, WEEK BY WEEK Since Antwerp fell it has seemed more than ever that this world is not our home, and the war seems more than ever like a war of Rome and Carthage. For the capture of Antwerp seems a blow at England. We were pretty sure all along that the Germans could beat up the Belgians if they put their minds on it, but it was hoped that England and France between them could furnish distraction enough to keep them diverted. But that has not proved feasible, and now it seems a longer road than ever to Tip- perary. The improved Krupp siege-guns seem to have made all exposed fortifications obsolete. We have been building some defenses lately ''KULTUR'' AND PRUSSIA 145 to protect the Panama Canal. It will be interesting to know if they would be of any use against these new Krupps. Fortifications are expensive and take up room, and perhaps it is something to be put to the credit of the big Krupps and the Zeppelins that they have destroyed the efficiency of forts. If there is to be no security in fortifications, folks who hope to live in the enjoyment of liberty and die in their beds must contrive new means of protection. The peace of the world must rest on some new understanding, ade- quately enforced, or perhaps we must just resign ourselves to tak- ing bigger chances. It was a bene- fit to the world and helped the 146 THE WAR, WEEK BY WEEK general cause of democracy when the early improvements in cannon put old-time city walls out of use. City dwellers have had more room ever since, and trade has been freer. Like advantages may come in the end out of the current improvements in war which have made it too efficient. When all modern knowledge and all the re- sources of modern industry are concentrated on the work of killing men by wholesale and destroying all their works, a degree of success is attained which is self-decapitat- ing. Questions like this current one, whether the Prussian Idea is the Only Hope and the Kaiser the Preferred Instrument of the Almighty, are, of course, very "KULTUR'' AND PRUSSIA 147 interesting indeed to discuss, but even to the Prussians themselves the discussion will seem too dear if the price of it is extermination. We do not realize this war, we Americans. The people who re- alize it most, as yet, are the Bel- gians, but all the countries actively concerned in it will realize in due time what it means when the resources of a mechanical civili- zation are concentrated on the destruction of human life. As for Belgium, she is like a country crucified for the saving of the nations. Of all the countries in- volved in the war, she was the most innocent, the best justified, the most gallant. Gashed with 148 THE WAR, WEEK BY WEEK innumerable wounds, her poor body is a witness, still living, against the aggressions of Prussia, and against our modern warfare by machinery. There comes in the papers an echo of complaint from England, alleging that negotiations are making here to stop the war, and protesting that the war cannot be stopped until it reaches its natural finish. As to negotiations we know nothing, and our newspapers have reported nothing. But it is true enough that the war cannot be lanced until it comes to a head. There are two ways in which the Prussian idea of world-domination may achieve its fate; one is to be beaten now from the outside; the ''KULTUR'' AND PRUSSIA 149 Other is to succeed now and be overthrown in due time from with- in. But, either way, it is a very- important idea that will consider- ably change the world; and cer- tainly if it crashes down in ruin now, all the other ideas of world- domination by a single empire, British, Russian, American or any other, will go with it. When the London Stock Exchange opens again for business it is likely to open on a world chastened into considerable respect for the text that embellishes the Exchange front: '*The Earth is the Lord's and the fulness thereof.'* DR. MUNSTERBERG S APPEAL ONE may open Professor Munsterberg's book, "The War and America," to scoff and close it to pray. There is little in it to change the opinions of Americans about the war, but there is a good deal that appeals to sympathy. Dr. Munsterberg's position is trying. He is a friend of this country, has cast in his lot with it, or, at least, is doing his life's work here, has been, he says, its defender against foolish detrac- tion abroad, has been a representa- tive of America among Germans, 150 DR. MUNSTERBERCS APPEAL 151 as also a representative of Ger- many among Americans. Now he is shocked and grieved when the country of his birth gets into a war with most of Europe to find American sentiment against Ger- many in overwhelming measure. He cannot understand it. He thinks there must be some mis- take; that we don't understand Germany and her position; don't know how good the Germans are, how important to the world, how imperiled by the jealousy of Eng- land, the unaccommodating spirit of Belgium, the revengefiilness of France, and the dark malice of Russia. How can we see these valuable and persistently peace- seeking people so atrociously as- 152 THE WAR, WEEK BY WEEK sailed and not be for them! Did not gallant old Steuben fight for us — better than Lafayette did — in the Revolution? Did not Ger- mans in considerable numbers fight for the Union in the Civil War? Is not nearly a quarter of our population of the German stock? At least we should be neutral — neutral in our feelings as well as in the actions of our government. Family ties, trade relations, art and science, respect and good- will had bound the United States and Germany and Austria closely together. "To-day,'* says Dr. Munsterberg, "one surging wave of hatred has swept it all away." ' ' Hatred ? ' ' Herr Professor ; hatred? Must the judge hate the DR. MUNSTERBERCS APPEAL 153 plantiff when he gives judgment for the defendant? "I have repeated incessantly," you write, ' ' that the desire for fairness is one of the deepest traits in the Ameri- can mind. Must I reverse all my enthusiasm and my faith?" No, don't reverse yet. See this misery through and watch how we behave. We are not necessarily unfair because the Franco-Bel- gian-British end of this trouble looks better to us than the German end. Maybe that end is the best. You admire our propensity to be fair, but the minute we incline against the German side in a great dispute you impugn our judicial capacity. Never mind ! Everything should 154 THE WAR, WEEK BY WEEK be excused to you because you are a suffering man, trying to make a bad case look good. No doubt it is impossible that you should see this case as we see it. Your book must convince any un- German reader that we shall never see the case as you see it. The idea which you offer of simple, honest Ger- many taking a few indispensable military precautions against the ravening wolves of Europe, and especially against the impending hug of the terrible bear, is comic to us, Herr Doctor. We can't help it. With all due respect, we remember Frederick William and his tall grenadiers, Frederick the Great and Maria Theresa, Bis- marck's Prussia and Austria in '66, DR. MUNSTERBERG'S APPEAL 155 and then what you call "the war of 1870 recklessly stirred by the intolerance of Imperial France," and since 1888 the Kaiser and his Krupps, and we smile, Herr Doctor; we just have to. Blood and iron is a great medi- cine, but Germany, as we see it, has overdosed herself with it. She has not made a friend in Europe since Bismarck died. They say he was overruled when Alsace and Lorraine were detached from France. They tell us the Kaiser was tricked into this war by the Prussian war-hogs. Alas, Pro- fessor Miinsterberg, it is not the Americans who are the enemies of Germany. You will find in due time that they do not hate the 156 THE WAR, WEEK BY WEEK good Germans. The enemies of Germany have been men of her own household, the men who have not only dreamed, but published to the world what you scornfully describe as "the fantastic dreams of the so-called Pan-Germans." Why, since 1870, has Germany confidently expected another great war? Why has she ceaselessly trained men, built fortresses, cast guns, hoarded money and organ- ized to the last detail a campaign against the rest of Europe? The reason, as we see it, is that the small class that guides the destinies of her industrious millions has had **God with Us" for its motto and *'Rule or Ruin" for its policy. Germany is a great country gone DR, MUNSTERBERG'S APPEAL i^-j wrong. She is getting what her rulers have earned for her. They have made her an impossible nation; a menace to mankind. She has put her trust in force, alienated her natural allies, dis- honored her treaties. Now her appeal to force has gone to judg- ment. If she conquers Europe ruin will find her in victory as it found Napoleon. If Europe con- quers her she will get off easier; but either way she has terrible sorrows ahead of her and is a fit object of pity for all kind people. A LITTLE MORE ARMAMENT FOR UNCLE SAM ! WE saw the German army march to Paris. We saw Liege fall, and since then we have watched the capture of Antwerp. We have stood by attentive while German submar- ines have sunk five British cruisers. We have also seen the German attacking force driven back from the Marne to the Aisne by the French and British forces, and German commerce chased from the seas by the British navy. We have been duly attentive to all 158 AMERICA NEEDS ARMAMENT 159 these spectacles, and unless we are very, very stupid, we must have acquired some new and definite realizations about modern war. Chief among them may well be the conviction that if we were to choose from the animal kingdom the creature that best exemplifies our relative condition among powerful nations, we would have to remove our good old eagle from our country's seal and coins and substitute for him the soft- shell crab. Considering what we are and what we have got, we are, next to China, the most defenseless con- siderable people on the crust. Only our modest navy impairs our claim to be the Pie of the Nations. i6o THE WAR, WEEK BY WEEK To be sure, we are too big to be conquered by any sudden dash, and have in us, besides, enormous potentiaHties of defense or agres- sion. To be sure, too, we are so pacific and so Httle ambitious to take anything from anybody, and so isolated that we can safely go much lighter armed and less pro- tected than any other great country. But we seem to have leaned too hard on isolation and our pacific reputation. This war that we have been watching has shown us that our coast defenses are pro- bably out of date; that, in pro- portion to oiir responsibilities, our navy is small and insufficiently equipped, and that our little skele- ton army needs more meat on its AMERICA NEEDS ARMAMENT i6i poor bones. Everyone who is in- terested in our equipment for war knows that it is conspicuously incomplete. No one knows it better than Europe and Japan. Mexico at our back door is a big bundle of disorders and anxieties. Our temporary tenure of Vera Cruz was threatened last week by some uneasy Mexican bandit, and may be threatened again to-morrow. What our duty to Mexico may come to be we do not know, but if our hopes should be disappointed and we should yet have to inter- vene, our whole military force in being would not be enough for the job. We are pacific, but we under- i62 THE WAR, WEEK BY WEEK take some duties which imply maintenance of a moderately com- petent apparatus of force. The Monroe Doctrine, that is part of our accepted foreign policy, is maintained not so much by us as by the navy of England. We see Germany, her vast efficiency in military matters, and the curious obsessions and aspirations to which the minds that control her are subject. We know that Ger- many has yearnings that conflict with our continental policy, and that what chiefly stands between them and us is England, now fighting for her life. We don't think England will be conquered, but if she should be, what have we got to back up such an answer AMERICA NEEDS ARMAMENT 163 as we should wish to make to a proposal from Germany that she should be allowed to improve the culture of Mexico or South Brazil? And there is Japan, whom we love considerably, and who, we doubt not, is fond of us, but who will think no less kindly of us for hav- ing due shot in our lockers, and being not only polite and consider- ate, but able-bodied. Are we not rather too short of munitions of war? Recent events have demonstrated that we are living on the same planet with nations whose supreme desire is to knock the heads off of one another, and who, just now, have subverted all their other business 1 64 THE WAR, WEEK BY WEEK to the accomplishment of that pur- pose. What this world will be like, or who will be boss in it, when present activities terminate, we cannot guess. What aims the conquerors will have or what means to accomplish them we cannot tell, but in a world so mad as this, plunging to conditions which cannot be foreseen, would it not be wise for us to add a little to our means of self-pro- tection? It takes three years to build a battleship. They say it takes a year to make a torpedo. It takes six months, at least, to make even an experimental soldier, and very much longer to make even an experimental sailor. We do not AMERICA NEEDS ARMAMENT i6s want to be a military nation, but we should not be too slack about military prepartion. Had we not better take, quietly but promptly, our little dose of the medicine which is being passed out in such vast quantities to Europe? Our situation has changed violently in three months. We ought to do something about it, and do it at once. The time is at hand when we shall have to take care of our- selves and may be called upon to protect some of our neighbors. Should we not qualify ourselves betimes for these duties? We are having a tremendous lesson in human history, from which, for us, one application is: In time of war prepare for peace ! 1 66 THE WAR, WEEK BY WEEK One alternative to employing some more troops and providing for annual provision of a moder- ate reserve of trained soldiers, and building a supply of torpe- does, submarines, and junk of that sort, and putting a rather larger share of the national mind and money into military and naval pro- vision, would be to come out for non-resistance. Bishop Greer has done that. To the average un- regenerate mind it does not look like a good course. But it looks about as good and quite as hope- ful as this other method that is now proceeding in Europe. To be between excessive armament and non-resistance is to be between the devil and the deep sea, and A MERICA NEEDS A RMA MENT 167 after all, drowning is a compara- tively easy death. What does anybody suppose Germany would do to the world if it sat down and let her have her way? The chances are that if all outside opposition were removed from her, the South Germans would presently get to work to rid themselves of the insufferable Prussian military caste, including every Hohenzollern who could be caught on his way to the tall timber. In the light of events in the last three months, the present united condition of Germany has come to look like a cruel union of the wolf and his prey. The great crime against Germany is not 1 68 THE WAR, WEEK BY WEEK British jealousy, not French re- venge, nor Russian mahce. It is German governmental stupidity. Not since William II assisted Bis- marck down the German front steps with his boot, has Germany produced a man who had the nec- essary gumption 'to get anything from Europe, except with a blud- geon. The Kaiser is not so bad a man, but he is of second or third- rate ability, and he has managed to concentrate in his sacred per- son virtually all authority over the destinies of the German people. Of course, at times, democracy is heartrending, but it isn't so bad as a hereditary Kaiserism. Stars above! This spectacle of a great people befuddled and mis- AMERICA NEEDS ARMAMENT 169 led in this century by one second- rate man, himself misled by a lot of bughouse militants whose trade is destruction ! It makes one want to go out and eat grass with the cows, like Nebuchadnezzar; to get in with the animals, of whom ''Not one is dissatisfied, not one is demented with the mania for owning things," (especially colonies), and who, though at times they fight, fight merely with horns and teeth and claws, and not with the very lat- est thing in modern improved machinery. It all makes one half -ashamed to buy a gun or order a torpedo, 170 THE WAR, WEEK BY WEEK though in our case, when we have done all that anyone as yet will dare propose, we shall have acquired no more than a fairly competent national police force. The world nowadays, under the great stimu- lation of German militarism, is like a city infested with gangs, where all the available money is spent in strengthening the gangs, and nothing for the police. Only in so far as our war-money is spent on something that will keep order in the world, will there be satis- faction in spending it. And per- haps it will be so spent, for if the warring gangs fight one another to a standstill and call for the police, it is we most of all who should be ready to respond. V GERMANY, THE DOCTOR THERE is no doubt about the efficiency of the great current German advertise- ment. Our German friends may- give themselves all credit. They have done the trick as it has never been done before. Everywhere their notice has taken the head of the column, and reading matter is lucky if it can squeeze in next to it. Up to the first of August Germany, as we saw it, was a country in Europe somewhere between France and Russia, that printed in an old-fashioned, middle-age type, 171 172 THE WAR, WEEK BY WEEK was good in music, beer, shipping, and manufactures, and rather bumptious in international poHtics. German history was so mixed up that only the more proficient students got far into it. German baths were good; so were German razors. The Germans were the best chemists, and made excellent toys. We knew them as efficient people; traded with them exten- sively; welcomed them here as visitors or settlers; but about the German mind and what was going on in it, very few of us had much knowledge or felt any particular concern. But since the fourth of August, when the Germans began to pub- lish their advertisement across the GERMANY, THE DOCTOR 173 line in Belgium, all that has changed. To all thinking people in the world, the compelling and engrossing thought has become Germany. What is she? How came she so? What does she want, and can she get it? Those have become the ruling subjects of enquiry, and enquirers have tackled them on the run. The one thing needful has seemed to be to understand Germany. Every- thing about her has assumed a vast importance — her place on the map, her history for ten centuries, her religions, her ambitions, her hatreds and the sources of them and, of course, her military and naval apparatus. We are all in the situation of the fisherman 174 THE WAR, WEEK BY WEEK when he had let the genie out of the bottle. We don't know what we have got, but we see that it is a mighty big thing, and want to know about it. We want to know, especially, what it is going to do to us. Already it has done a lot. Peo- ple used to laugh about the Belgian lion, especially the one on the monument at Waterloo. It may be that the careless morals of the late Leopold impaired the dignity of Belgiimi's reputation. At any rate, most people thought rather of her thrift than of her punch. But over her line drives Germany, and behold Belgium the wild-cat; Bel- gium who dared the Minotaur; GERMANY, THE DOCTOR 175 Belgium, the savior of France, the defense of England, the pepper in the monster*s eye, the hero, the martyr ! Never such a splendor of glory and of sympathy — and, alas! punishment — as the great German advertisement has brought to little Belgium. And France, whose vice has been thrift, behold her a spend- thrift of all things precious! Emotional France! See her calm, determined, prompt; well ordered, well generaled; matching strength with strength, prodigal in devo- tion, intelligent in sacrifice. There is a new England. Lloyd George tells how "A great flood of luxury and sloth which had sub- merged the land is receding and 176 THE WAR, WEEK BY WEEK a new Britain is appearing" that "can see for the first time the fundamental things that matter in hfe and that have been obscured ... by the tropical growth of prosperity." Very wonderful, all this. Ger- many is the great doctor of Europe. Played-out men and women have been going to her to be cured for generations. Now she is bringing her cure to those who stayed at home. Oh, the amazing Germany! she that practically single-handed has served notice on Europe : ' ' Obey or fight for freedom ! " How came it to be in her? Out of what far-off springs, what inward strivings, GERMANY, THE DOCTOR 177 what leadings, what visions and hallucinations has come to her this extraordinary call to be the purge of a commercialized civilization! How came it that the Germans, a people mostly simple, kindly, and affectionate, should suddenly tran- spire as '^the stern hand of fate to scourge us to an elevation where we can see the everlasting things that matter for a nation?" We want to know; we want to understand. Everything about Germany has become vitally inter- esting. We examine her on the map. We seize on the books that tell her symptoms and the history of her case. We cannot read Von Treitschke, but we read about him ; and we read Nietzsche and Bern- 178 THE WAR, WEEK BY WEEK hardi and Usher and Cramb and many more. In Germans, German- born or American-born, we have a new interest. Three months ago we gave them no special thought. Now we look at each of them curiously, trying to see in them some trace of this prodigious insanity that has shaken the world. When the French went mad and purged Europe they had a great leader. But the Germans have no great leader. They have a sublime delusion and a magnifi- cent machine. Their leaders, it would seem, are Von Treitschke and Nietzsche, both dead. Their Kaiser is a gallant but not a wise man; their whole leadership, spir- itual and political, seems touched GERMANY, THE DOCTOR 179 with madness and inevitably des- tined to disaster. But, oh, the marvel and the splendor of it! And, oh, the immense effect of it on a machine-crazed world — slack in faith, greedy of ease, and filled with people jealous of the means and easements of their neighbors! THINKING LIKE A GERMAN IT is related that Captain Disco Troop, who went out of Gloucester to the Banks, could think like a cod, and did so think when he was after cod, and so filled his schooner and got home before his brethren. We in this country are not yet out after Germans, but we are closely concerned with them and mightily concerned about them, and it seems very important that we should learn to think like a German. For three months now a great many of us have been 1 80 THINKING LIKE A GERMAN i8i trying to do it, with such assist- ance as we could get from available authorities on German thought, and from an exceedingly stimu- lating spectacle of German action. We have read the newspapers, including great numbers of letters- to-the-editor, both from Germans and anti-Germans, statements from all kinds of professors, reports from returning travelers, appeals in great number from professional writers, and "white papers" and government manifestoes. We have read the English reviews, our own magazines and reviews, and books or extracts from books by Bernhardi, Treitschke, Usher, Cramb, Wile, Biilow, and the rest. From these researches, coupled 1 82 THE WAR, WEEK BY WEEK with our observation of current events reflected with more or less distortion, most of us have con- cluded that Germans think steadily the will-to-power, conceiving of the world as their lawful apple, from eating which they have been far too long restrained by the rest of mankind, and especially by England. We think we think like a German when we think Kaiserism, Prussianism, the rule of might, blood, and iron, Deutsch- land uber Alles, Force the higher law, and all that. Accordingly, it is getting to be that every German is suspect. Three months ago we thought of Germans not very often, being concerned with baseball, woman suffrage, our THINKING LIKE A GERMAN 183 home-grown politics, the refor- mation of society, the efforts of the Alexander Berkman crowd to con- fer moral importance on disorder, the efforts to expel the bad germs from business, the vivisection of the railroads, the chastening of the express companies, and Becky Edelson's disinclination to eat in jail. When we did think of Ger- mans we thought of them respect- fully and kindly, and with the sen- timent that it was foolish of the abstinence party people to inter- vene between them and beer. But since August ist all these other topics have been virtually wiped off the slate, and we think, most of the time, about Germans, and think like a German in so far as we can. 1 84 THE WAR, WEEK BY WEEK Are we doing it? Are we really thinking like a German when we think the Germans are out to capture the earth? Are we justified in thinking of all the Germans, here and everywhere, as for Germany against the world? Must we think of Herman Ridder for example, as awaiting, with a concrete howitzer base in his back garden, the coming of the Krupps to the Western Hemisphere? Are our neighbors here of German derivation potential spies of the Kaiser and potential allies of the Kaiserland against this Republic that has sheltered them? Ger- many in this war is, apparently, a very compact, united nation. In action all the Germans are work- THINKING LIKE A GERMAN 185 ing in unison, fighting, paying, dying, shoulder to shoulder; are we to infer that in every German mind exists this strenuous pur- pose, avowed by one great school of German thought and finding its due expression in a war defended or extenuated by all the rest — the purpose to impose on earth the HohenzoUern will as its dominant governmental force; to seize for Germany whatever Germans covet; to kill and destroy what- ever stands in the way of Ger- man ambition, humbling all other powers that Germany may increase? If to think these thoughts is to think like a German, then we Americans ought all to realize it. 1 86 THE WAR, WEEK BY WEEK ''Given that mood of mind," writes a friend to this paper, ''victory for the Teuton would be more terrible than defeat, as the world would be delivered to a succession of barren struggles, ending in such suspicion and de- spair as creation has never wit- nessed. " How is it? How many German minds have yielded to this terrible obsession? How many of the Gennan fighting men are consciously expressing it ? How many feel themselves committed to world-power or downfall? It is the habit of peoples, when involved in a serious war, to fight first and think afterwards. The trouble about thinking like the THINKING LIKE A GERMAN 187 German masses is that there is no evidence that the German masses have yet begun to think. They are very busy fighting and taking care of wounded men, and a great many already are dead. Vor- waerts, the Social-Democrat Ger- man paper, showed signs of think- ing, and (we hear) was suppressed. The only German thought that shows just now is this Pan-Ger- m a n, world-power, Machtpolitik thought that has brought on and is conducting the war. The mass of Germans behaves as though it was completely penetrated and pos- sessed with this thought. If we are to think like a German it is the only important and effective thought available for us at present. 1 88 THE WAR, WEEK BY WEEK And yet, if we attribute it to all Germans, it may be we shall do them an injustice. It may be that they are already beginning to think thoughts of their own not identical with this governing thought of the Prussian force- worshippers, and that a little further along in the war, when the Russians, say, finally cross the German border, we shall begin to get a new line of Ger- man thought which is not de- rived from Treitschke and Bern- hardi, and, perhaps, is not strictly Hohenzollern. Let us wait a bit and see. The new thought, if it comes, may be very, very interesting and fruitful ; fruitful possibly of the sort of fruit that hangs from trees by THINKING LIKE A GERMAN 189 hempen stems and is harvested in coffins. Let us wait. And especially let our brother Americans of German descent be advised to wait a little, too, and not be absolutely confi- dent that they are thinking like Germans until the whole of Ger- man thought has had a chance to disclose itself. The present leaders and direct- ors of German thought and action are the most important foes of democracy in the world. If our fellow-republicans here of German descent give the whole of their adherence to their present leaders, the later German sober second thought may terribly embarrass them. What will they say — 190 THE WAR, WEEK BY WEEK Ridder, Miinsterberg, the Roose- velt Exchange Professors and all the Kaiserbund — if German thought suddenly changes on them? Who will they speak for then? Not for the United States, certainly, for they don't now; and not for Germany if Germany sheds the Kaiser. We do not envy the gentlemen in this country who have got in with the Kaiser. If his tires go flat they will have a very long walk home. Assistant Secretary Roosevelt says we have not enough men in the Navy by eighteen thousand to man the ships we have in stock. Mr. Roosevelt would be obliged THINKING LIKE A GERMAN 191 if Congress would authorize the Navy Department to recruit that number of men and add them to the force that the law at present allows. We believe Mr. Joseph H. Choate, lately ambassador, would back Air. Roosevelt in this desire. In the introduction that he has contributed to Cramb's Germany and England Mr. Choate says : "What is going on now is a con- test for the empire of the world, and we have no use for empire. But if we really wish for peace against all hazards, we must ever strengthen our Navy and train every youth in the Republic, as he approaches manhood, to such an extent as shall qualify him to be 192 THE WAR, WEEK BY WEEK converted into an efficient soldier at the shortest notice." Mr. Choate does not wish to bring on war, but to keep out of it. With armament it is as it is with drink and many other things. Too much is worse than none; enough is better than none. Germany's awful example of too much arma- ment will be used by the inconsid- erate to scare us out of having enough, but we must have an ade- quate minimum apparatus of pro- tection. After all, how little a conqueror can conquer! When forcible re- sistance is overcome he thinks he has won, but he has only begun. There may be, there usually is, THINKING LIKE A GERMAN 193 defeat in triumph and triumph in defeat. The conqueror can kill the body; he can destroy cities; he can spread starvation, change boundaries and flags. But his missiles cannot kill the spirit. If a beaten race survives it remains a factor in life. If it is extermin- ated, the conquering nation can- not escape the reckoning for its cruelty. Its own spirit reflects its conduct, is maimed when it inflicts an unjust wound, is chained by the chains it fastens on its prisoners, is seared by its ferocities, blasted by its ambitions, blood-poisoned by its fiiry. And in the end, what lasts is ideas. The Jews have had no country for nearly two thousand 13 194 THE WAR, WEEK BY WEEK years, but they had an idea, and they have lasted and have pros- pered. The Greeks ended cen- tiiries ago as a poHtical power, but their ideas still influence man- kind enormously. The Romans were conquered and reconquered long since, but Roman law and the Roman character and some of the Roman ideas about political and colonial government and the regu- lation of life are still active factors in our world. It is important that order should be kept on this planet, but it is not so important who keeps it as people think. What is important is the ideas that de- velop when it gives them a chance. GERMANY AND COLONIES A MAN who returned a book by Nietzsche to the PubHc Library remarked as he passed it in: "This does not get under my skin." The remark applies to the efforts of the German apologists in this country. Some of these gentle- men have done better than others, but none of them has got under the American skin. Their best has been to bring some ideas and arguments to American attention that later on may help to inspire sentiments that may be useful 195 196 THE WAR, WEEK BY WEEK to Germany. A good many of us, for instance, think with sympathy of Germany's yearning for good colonial possessions, where Ger- mans may develop as Germans and the German language will not have to yield to English. That seems a natural aspiration for a crowded and energetic country, but while, in a way, we sym- pathize with it, we are not ready yet to help break up and make over the various continents in order to further it. No doubt we understand and like the English civilization better than the Ger- man because it is based in demo- cracy and is more like our own, but we are not finally committed to the idea that the English are the GERMANY AND COLONIES 197 Chosen People and ought for the world *s good to inherit the earth. We should be glad to have the Germans have greater territorial possessions if it could be accom- plished without intolerable disturb- ance and if the Germans showed any considerable qualifications for successful colonization. But nobody seems able to endure Ger- man rule but Germans. They can stand the German method when they have to. Other peoples hate it, and even Germans, once they have escaped it, stay away. It is related that when Dean Richmond was president of the New York Central Railroad some one said to him: "I see all your conductors have gold watches and 198 THE WAR, WEEK BY WEEK diamond pins. Those men must be knocking down fares. I should think you'd discharge them." But Mr. Richmond said: "These present conductors have already provided themselves with dia- mond pins and gold watches. Do you really think we would do well to substitute for them a lot of new men with diamonds and watches still to get?" So, in spite of our sympathy with German desires, the profit to the world of having Germany supersede England as a colonial power seems very dubious. Eng- land has been greedy and is now pretty well glutted; she has been harsh and has grown almost gen- tle; her manners have been bad. GERMANY AND COLONIES 199 but they have improved. In so far as she niles colonies now, she does it chiefly by persuasion. The thought of having Germany, the new broom, sweep through the continents, excites far more dis- may than enthusiasm. No doubt there should be organ- ized a great holding company to take title to the outlying portions of the earth, and give deserving peoples privileges of residence and exploitation in spare lands that would suit them. If there were such a holding company it may be that Germany would get good openings, for there are vast regions which her widely advertised Kultur might very much improve. 2O0 THE WAR, WEEK BY WEEK Instead of which wc see it now devoted to an appalling destruc- tion: sacrificing by the hundred thousand the lives of its own young men — very good young men, most of them — killing also by the hun- dred thousand the valuable and rather scarce young men of France and Belgium and England, and wasting in like manner the youth of illimitable Russia, who has room for them all, and involv- ing Austria and, one after another, the other outlying nations, in corresponding sacrifice and de- struction. It is bad, bad, bad ; and all grows out of the vice of nationality, which is so nearly a virtue and yet raises such particular hob. GERMANY AND COLONIES 201 And here in these States all we seem able to do about it is to say how dreadful it is, and moan, and give something to a fund, and go home to dinner. How are we go- ing to get our medicine? How shall this enormous discipline the world is undergoing be brought home to us to our spiritual profit? Of course we have been pinched in the general squeeze. A great deal of our business has had and is having a hard scramble to get along. The collapse of the cotton market is only one of many troubles growing out of the war which put people out of their habits of living, and involve loss of employment, and distress. The war does reach 202 THE WAR, WEEK BY WEEK us and may yet pinch us hard enough to compel great co-oper- ative and perhaps governmental measures for relief at home as well as abroad. But it might, and may, go further than that as a disciplinary experience and yet not exceed our national needs. The seeds of it seem to be very deep. It is the culmination of a world-wide unrest, due to some- thing more than armament and the jealousies of nations, and felt in this country and China as distinctly as in the countries that are fighting. We of the United States have by no means escaped this general infection. We have had the suffrage agitation, the Progressive movement, such queer GERMANY AND COLONIES 203 signs of uneasiness as last year's fashions and the tango, and an anti-capitaHst revolution with in- dictments and a fight against the railroads and the trusts. England has like disquietudes or worse. France had its excitements, like the Caillaux case and a political deadlock. Conditions peculiar to Europe have made the disturbance over there culminate in this huge and deadly conflict of nations, out of which the survivors may hope to emerge cured of their insanities. But how are we to be cured of ours? Will the treatment we have had, joined to what we are getting as we sit here on the edge of the hurri- cane, be enough? Is there dis- cipline enough coming, joined to 204 THE WAR, WEEK BY WEEK what we have had, to knock the nonsense out of us, too, and jolt us back into just relations with the realities of life? That is the nature of the ques- tion which many minds must be cogitating as we read of the Ger- mans crossing and recrossing the Yser on the bodies of their fellows. Tolstoi, in his curious forecast of world troubles at this time, saw them all proceed out of the "eternal courtesan, CommerciaHsm. " But that means the whole world- structure of money-making busi- ness, with its vast machinery of machines, factories, shops, banks; the whole apparatus of industrial- ism and finance. Against that GERMANY AND COLONIES 205 there has been proceeding in this country a fight for fifteen years which has come to a point where the whole money-caste (so to speak) has been dislodged from political control, leaving the admin- istration of government for the most part in the hands of men who can prove an alibi when accused of being seen in the company of a dollar. As a result, a very large proportion of the experience, ability, and leadership of the country has become unavailable for the public service, and the difficulty and expense of command- ing a sufficient advertisement to capture the public fancy has made it hard to bring forward the best men from the residue. Neverthe- 206 THE WAR, WEEK BY WEEK less, we get some of them — perhaps enough; and under Mr. Wilson's leadership we are getting along pretty well. But the great war has caught us in the middle of a big experiment, and if, as seems possible, we are called upon to be an example to the world and a life- preserver to the perishing, we shall have to make a monumental scramble to discharge the con- spicuous duties thrust upon us with the requisite energy and skill. The world seems to be getting into a condition which somebody will have to rise to, and nobody else appears of the requisite size to do it but ourselves. But size will not be enough unless we have also quality and to manifest that will GERMANY AND COLONIES 207 call for a greater co-operation of the intelligence and vigor of the country than our political affairs have seen for a good while past. There is likely to be more for this country to do than to trade on the misfortunes of Europe, or even spend what it can spare in retail succoring. A huge effort to help may be required of us which will lift us out of the trough of selfish- ness as war is lifting the nations of Europe, and will compel such a use of all our resources and such a co-operation of all our abilities as shall really teach us what we are and can do if we have to try. Our immediate opportunity is to succor the distressed Bulgarians. No one is in a position to do that 2o8 THE WAR, WEEK BY WEEK but ourselves. What we have done so far is but a drop in the bucket. The people at large have not yet got into this work, and until they do it will not be done in the measure that the emergency calls for. THE GERMAN IDEAL PROFESSOR Kuno Francke of Harvard is one of the more successful German apologists because he is intelligent and not overbearing. He comes, not from Prussia, like Dr. Miinster- berg, but from Schleswig-Hol- stein, and has apparently inherited amenities with his Danish deri- vation. In a recent speech in Boston he explains that while there is still work for freedom to do in Germany, "it cannot be said that freedom during the last generation 14 209 210 THE WAR, WEEK BY WEEK has been the great national need of Germany, or that it is any longer the ideal that inspires Germany's best men." It has not, he says, been replaced by militarism, nor is world-dominion the ideal of re- sponsible Germans. Their ideal is of national self -improvement and national efficiency. "To the Ger- man the State is a spiritual, col- lective personality leading a life of its own beyond the lives of individuals, and its aim is not the protection of the happiness of individuals, but the making of a nobler type of man and the achieve- ment of high excellence in all the departments of life." This is the Kaiser's ideal, too, and his glori- fication of his office "makes him THE GERMAN IDEAL 211 the incarnation of the active and disciplined Germany." We are all trying hard just now to understand the Germans, and these words of Dr. Francke are adapted to help us. Just now this German ideal has to be taken in association with about five million highly competent soldiers, all practicing to spread it, and a large supply of exceptionally efficient Krupp guns exploding to the same end. The association is a little trying to the ideal. Is that a mere misfortune, or do the Army and the ideal belong together? Is this German ideal necessarily tied up to militarism because it is necessarily hostile to the ideal of individual freedom that belongs to such 212 THE WAR, WEEK BY WEEK nations as France, England, Bel- gium, and the United States? Nobody outside of Germany would object, it would seem, to Dr. Francke*s German ideal unless there is something in it that threat- ens the security of other nations. Is there something? Our ideal of individual freedom is vague, vulnerable, impracticable often, outrageous sometimes. A lot of bad government usually gets in with it. This German ideal is smooth, efficient, steady, powerful — until it blows up. Must it blow up? Does it carry in it the germs of certain destruc- tion? There is so much about it that THE GERMAN IDEAL 213 is strange, almost incredible, to us. It is so old-time- Jewish in some things. The Kaiser seems to be to the Germans what Moses was to the Israelites — a go-between between them and God; a leader, a master. All peoples, it seems, must start that way, gathering around a master whose will protects and directs them, but it is hard to think of the Germans as beginners. But as a great modern power they are beginners, and this system that they have endured has brought them along, in material things at least, very wonderfully. But has it been doing what Dr. Francke says its ideal calls for? Has it been making a nobler type of man? It has certainly achieved 214 ?^^^£ ^^^^. WEEK BY WEEK high excellence in many of the departments of life. But in all? No. Not in all. It is good in Krupps and chemistry, in manu- factures, in trade, in civic gov- ernment, in the regulation of life for the promotion of average com- fort. It is bad in art. It is not notable in the higher forms of literature. And as to the great point of making nobler types of men — has it done it? The Ger- mans are notably efficient, but are they creative, are they inventive, and are they nobler than other men? They have told us that democratic France was decadent; that democratic England was a pretense and an empty shell; that Russia was barbarous. They said THE GERMAN IDEAL 215 nothing about Belgium. There ought to be a Nobel prize for nobility. If there were, would it go to Germany? One sees in Germany immense efficiency, cour- age, aggressiveness, capacity to suffer, but where, so far, has she been noble? In Belgium? At Louvain? At Rheims? Her speciality is fighting, but man for man she can't handle the Belgians or the new. French, and her superiority to the Russians is dubious, while as for the English, they are but a handful so far in this war, but it has been a handful for Germany. No; get them out of their shops and laboratories and the current 2i6 THE WAR, WEEK BY WEEK Germans don't seem to be of an egregious nobility. The Belgians can give them odds in it, and they seem to have nothing on the lately decadent French. They must be learning a wonderful lot about the qualities of other people, and perhaps they are revising their self- esteem. Arthur Withington, of New- buryport, who writes a letter to the Springfield Repuhlicanj says: *' Efficiency and the acceptance of arbitrary authority by the sacri- fice of liberty is admitted as a Socialistic end. In other words, Socialism is in being in Germany to-day. The Kaiser is fighting its fight and German culture is Social- ism. THE GERMAN IDEAL 217 What is there in Dr. Francke's exposition of the German ideal that conflicts with this opinion? Mr. Withington says further: ^*When this war is over, Social- ism, Prohibition, the Kaiser's mailed fist, Lord Kitchener's mili- tary rule, and all other manifes- tations of the gospel of force and the Anti- Christian movement will have less blind followers than dur- ing the last quarter of a century. There will be a return to the simple faith of the fathers that govern- ment is a necessary evil." Shouldn't wonder; shouldn't wonder at all. And not the least of the wonders to come will be the adjustment of the German ideal to the change in faith. "^ This book is due two weeks from the last date stamped below, and if n'>t returned or renewed at or before that time a fine of five cents a day will be incurred. - — y nx J' JNI2tt97 'M i 6 1997 APR 17 2001 ■ ] H-jiC ^ s. S4o3\ r^^G^ COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY LIBRARIES