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William Koccoc CI)apcr 
 
 GERMANY VS. CIVILIZATION. 
 
 THE LIFE AND LETTERS OF JOHN HAY. 
 2 vols. Illustrated. 
 
 LIFE AND TIMES OF CAVOUR. 3 vols. 
 Illustrated. 
 
 ITALIC A : Studies in Italian Life and Letters, 
 
 A SHORT HISTORY OF VENICE. 
 
 THE DAWN OF ITALIAN INDEPENDENCE: 
 Italy from the Congress of Vienna, 1814, to the 
 Fall of Venice, 1849. In the series on Conti- 
 nental History. With maps, a vols. 
 
 THRONE-MAKERS. Papers on Bismarck, Na- 
 poleon III., Kossuth, Garibaldi, etc. 
 
 POEMS, NEVy AND OLD. 
 
 HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY 
 Boston and New York 
 
GERMANY vs. CIVILIZATION 
 
 NOTES ON THE ATROCIOUS WAR 
 
GERMANY vs. CIVILIZATION 
 
 NOTES ON THE ATROCIOUS WAR 
 
 BY 
 
 WILLIAM ROSCOE THAYER 
 
 And he nviil be a iviid man; his 
 hand ivill be against e'very many and 
 e'very man" s hand against him. 
 
 Genesis xvi, 12. 
 
 BOSTON AND NEW YORK 
 HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY 
 
 1916 
 
COPYRIGHT, 1916, BY WILLIAM ROSCOE THAYKR 
 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED 
 
 Published March tqib 
 
 /6- - 
 
 1^ d6n 
 
 

 NOTE 
 
 While this book is on the press, President 
 Wilson has taken a firm stand, from which, 
 we may hope, he will put an end to foreign 
 arrogance and to domestic plotting and sedi- 
 tion. My references to his policy, written 
 earlier, reflect the grave anxiety which many 
 of us felt during the autumn and winter, and 
 I let them remain because they bear witness 
 to a very important element in the crisis. The 
 long period of doubt over the President's in- 
 tentions not only stifled American patriotism, 
 but greatly encouraged the enemies at work 
 in the United States. 
 
 In this sketch I have purposely assembled a 
 sufficient body of the characteristic doctrines 
 of the shapers of Prussian policy, from Fred- 
 erick the Great to General Bernhardi, to re- 
 mind the reader of the essential German ele- 
 ments underlying the Atrocious War. These 
 
vi NOTE 
 
 will enable him to see that my own conclu- 
 sions are based on German premises and facts, 
 and not on calumnies invented by foreigners. 
 During the progress of the struggle, such es- 
 sentials are often forgotten, or are obscured 
 by excitement over military, naval, or diplo- 
 matic events. Nothing is more important, 
 however, than that the origins of this conflict, 
 and the doom which awaits Civilization unless 
 Kultur is crushed, be thoroughly understood. 
 
 W. R. T. 
 
 Cambridge, Massachusetts 
 March d, 1916, 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 I. Humiliation — not Thanksgiving . i 
 
 II. Reality or Mirage? ii 
 
 III. Atavism 24 
 
 IV. Manipulating Teutonic Traits . . 37 
 V. The Kaiser and Gott Partnership . 47 
 
 VI. William the Peacemaker ... 65 
 
 VII. Kultur 80 
 
 VIII. Prussianizing Germany .... 106 
 IX. How the Atrocious War Began. . 119 
 
 X. Belgium 134 
 
 ' XI. Mendacity 149 
 
 XII. The Plot to Germanize America . 172 
 
 XIII. The Shipwreck of Kultur . . .201 
 
 XIV. Despotism or Democracy.? . . . 222 
 

 GERMANY vs. CIVILIZATION 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 HUMILIATION — NOT THANKSGIVING 
 
 O, well for him whose will is strong. 
 He suffers, but he will not suffer long; 
 He suffers, but he cannot suffer wrong. 
 
 Tennyson. 
 
 FOR the second time since the Atrocious 
 War began, the President of the United 
 States calls upon us Americans to observe a 
 day of Thanksgiving, on which we shall ex- 
 press gratitude for the manifold blessings 
 Providence has showered upon us. 
 
 Our harvests have surpassed all bounds. 
 Our industries, under the unhealthy stimulus 
 of war, have raised the wages of millions of 
 laborers. Like the Pharisee we can thank God 
 that we are not like our neighbors: they are at 
 war, we are at peace. 
 
 A year ago. President Wilson bade us hold a 
 similar Thanksgiving ; and those who have the 
 
2 GERMANY vs, CIVILIZATION 
 
 catchwords of religion on their lips, but infi- 
 delity in their hearts, might infer — from our 
 increased prosperity — that our prayers and 
 thank-offerings were acceptable, and have 
 been rewarded in overflowing measure. 
 
 But those are not gods of the spirit who 
 substitute gifts of corn and copper and iron 
 and gasolene for the spiritual gifts, for lack of 
 which our souls perish. In this crisis a true 
 prophet of the soul would call us not to thanks- 
 giving but to humiliation — the humiliation 
 that every heart, into which the faintest in- 
 stinct of nobleness has glimmered, must feel 
 when it recognizes that it has betrayed the 
 very law of its being. 
 
 During fourteen months the memory of 
 
 our dark shortcoming, of our great refusal, 
 
 -j has lain like a mildew on our American con- 
 
 ' science. Some of us, singly, have repudiated 
 
 the shame ; but even if every American had 
 
 made his private disavowal, we should not 
 
 ^ have been freed from our supreme obligation. 
 
 ^ It was for the President of the United States, 
 

 HUMILIATION 3 
 
 sitting in the chair where Washington and 
 Lincoln have sat, the guardian for the time 
 being of the principles on which this Republic . 
 
 was founded, — the principles which have up- \I^ 
 held it for one hundred and forty years, the ^ /^ut^ 
 principles which alone justify its existence T>uX^^-£Ji 
 and its perpetuation, — it was for President ^^^'^^'^:^ 
 Wilson, speaking for this nation, to utter the 
 word of repudiation which could have ab- 
 solved us from the guilt of allowing Belgium la 
 
 A to be violated without our protest. 
 ^^ He kept silent. 
 
 . Day after day brought news of fresh atroci- 
 
 ^J^c.ties committed by the Germans in Belgium. 
 
 ^^^^^^'What might have been regarded at first as a 
 
 \^cO^^^^ sporadic cases of such cruelty as often 
 
 jAy^ccompanies war, proved to be in truth only"V^>^^^ 
 
 f^\^ the beginning of the enforcement of a system 
 
 ^^pToi Frightfulness, deliberately planned years 
 
 ^(r before in the Bureau of the Prussian General 
 
 Staff, unhesitatingly approved by the German 
 
 Emperor, and now carried out with diabolical 
 
 precision. Very soon the weight of testimony 
 
4 GERMANY vs. CIVILIZATION 
 
 became overwhelming, but still President 
 
 Wilson was silent. Considerations of policy, 
 
 doubts as to expediency, flitted between him 
 
 and his conscience. Perhaps the reported 
 
 (J<Jt ^ abominations were not true; it was the duty 
 
 Mk ' of the President of the United States to^sus- 
 
 ^ I ; ^ pend judgment until he had heard all the evi- 
 
 ^ ^ i ' dence from every side ; if he protested against 
 
 ^^^i^^ the German acts, he would be accused of 
 
 *^> * denying the neutrality which he had officially 
 
 set up to guide this country throughout the 
 
 War; the etiquette of diplomacy would regard 
 
 such a protest as not only out of order, but as 
 
 unmannerly; worse still, a moral protest not 
 
 backed up by physical force would be futile, — 
 
 as if a moral act could ever be futile, — and 
 
 the Germans, who had announced that they 
 
 took no heed of anything except physical force, 
 
 would laugh at us. 
 
 And so President Wilson was silent. 
 The days slipped by and grew into weeks. 
 Thousands of non-combatants, men, women, 
 and children, died in agony. Even the inani- 
 
HUMILIATION 5 
 
 mate objects of beauty, created by genera- 
 tions of men to whom the very name Prus- 
 sian was happily unknown, and spared by 
 the ravages of countless earlier wars, were^/uct^Ve 
 wantonly destroyed. ^^^ * ^ Vt 
 
 The University of Louvain, with its gem- 
 like Library, was demolished; the Cathedral U^j. .^^ 
 at Malines sank in ruins; the masterpieces at (^liaWA- 
 Ypres, at Arras, and at a score of other cities 2c^*^l^ 
 went down; and when the devastators spread ^^^^^^^^^Xul 
 into France, they made the Cathedral of U^ ^^»^ 
 Rheims — the national shrine of French wor- ' ^ ' 
 ship for seven hundred years — the target 
 of their artillery. 'i 
 
 J Still President Wilson was silent. 
 
 But while time brings opportunity it does ^ , 
 not take away remorse for opportunity neg- r(. ': , 
 lected. We sin in time, but our guilt cannot .,, ^ 
 be measured in terms of years: for sin and/ Ua t^ 
 remorse are moral not temporal. Vax* 
 
 Wherein lay our guilt ^ It lay in our failure 
 as a nation through the silence of the Presi- 
 dent to bear witness to the deepest truth 
 
-aAJL. 6 GERMANY vs. CIVILIZATION 
 
 which civilized men have felt or can feel. A 
 horde of military barbarians violated the neu- 
 ^^ ^ "" ' trality of little Belgium, which we, with other 
 - / g9^\ernments, had pledged ourselves to up- 
 hold, — and we said nothing. And then that 
 c^ ", horde sped on, its gray-clad regiments sifting 
 W^A* over Belgium, as the showers of ashes from 
 J2^ -W^/Vesuvius once fell upon Pompeii with irre- 
 uyr\^ mediable havoc. In this outrage on Humanity 
 ■^^I^^J^ also, the Huns flung their challenge at us, 
 '^'*^-W: ' and we said nothing. 
 
 ^Y^.,. But we of all the nations of the earth were 
 j^ /^ . bound by the strongest obligations to speak 
 i ^^ \ up for the sacred principles of humanity. 
 ^S 'r 1 ^^ ^^^^ ^^^ "^^^^ powerful free people in the 
 i^" .1 "^ world, and to possess power imposes the obli- 
 T- • «j gation to use it in behalf of the weak. The 
 \jt^\vw.i little countries looked to us for leadership, 
 looked and listened and waited, and we gave 
 them neither sign nor sound. They would 
 have joined us in protest even at the risk of 
 bringing on themselves the fury of the Ger- 
 mans, within whose reach they dwelt. Our 
 
HUMILIATION 7 
 
 silence — the silence of President Wilson — 
 
 " Letting ' I dare not ' wait upon * I would ' " — 
 brought to them the desolating conviction j^^ 
 that the United States would officially utter ^J^t^ 
 no declaration in behalf either of neutrality /^ '^^^*'^^-^ 
 or of humanity;. We tacitly admitted that a '^^^^'^^ 
 small nation has no rights, that neutral na- <5^^ ^ 
 tions may be overrun and destroyed at the oiJi ouj 
 pleasure of a powerful aggressor. The Presi- t£^JL^J^Ai^ 
 dent's silence was tantamount to acquiescing ^^^^^ 
 in the German doctrine that might is right, 
 that matter and not spirit rules the universe, 
 including the conduct and the affairs of men. 
 This is the primal infidelity. 
 
 So to our shame we let it be implied that 
 the Government of the United States was not 
 officially concerned in protesting against the 
 subversion of neutral rights, or the swallow- . 
 
 A ' J. 
 
 ing up of a small nation by a large, or by j^ 
 
 crimes against common humanity. It was as ^"^ vj;^ 
 if President Wilson, clothed with the moral /^^^^^ 
 Strength of the United States, had been walk- o\Kf^ dLou 
 ing on the bank of a stream, and had seen on 
 
8 GERMANY vs. CIVILIZATION 
 
 the other bank a colossal brute beating a little'^^ ^ 
 girl; and the President had said to himself: ^ «xi, 
 "There is no boat for me to cross by, and if I , ,._ 
 shout, the ruffian will only laugh. After all, j^>.^ 
 my eyesight is not very good; perhaps I don't 
 see clearly what he is doing. I ought not to - cju 
 protest unless I could verify the fact for my- 
 self; that is impossible; so I will look the other 
 way and walk on." 
 
 Into such an abyss does consideration for 
 the etiquette of diplomacy plunge those'jfc^ho 
 set it above morals. In this aspect, oijlo- 
 macy is indeed a code distilled from the imme- 
 morial experience of the guile and cruelty of 
 rulers, which sanctions them in committing, 
 as officials, crimes which all but the wickedest 
 of them would shrink from as individuals. 
 If plain Professor Woodrow Wilson had wit- 
 nessed such an assault, we may be sure that 
 he would not have doubted the veracity of 
 his eyes, and that, though he had been un- 
 able to rescue the little girl from her assailant, 
 he would have protested in loudest tones. 
 
r%j I.JW vaT^ 
 
 HUMILIATION 9 
 
 The assumption that nations and their 
 rulers cannot be bound by the moral laws 
 which bind individuals will not go on forever 
 polluting the world. It also iis. the spawn of 
 infidelity, and proceeds from the theory that 
 men collectively — whether nations, hierarch- 
 ies, parties, or corporations — are impersonal, 
 abstract, and that, having no souls, they are ^* * * ""'"^ ^ 
 shut out from moral concerns. -^ * 
 
 ljj£ diplomacy which seals the lips of the 
 sJRpy^pian of a mighty nation, when he be-^}'?^ 1^^ 
 hold^wh'J^oiister invade, outrage, torture, and ' 
 
 destroy a tiny nation, is born of the Devil. It 
 stifles chivalry; it leashes in the desire which 
 is an instinct in the heart of every one worthy 
 of the name of man to rush to the aid of 
 the helpless in their distress; it strangles our 
 common heritage of humanity, and substitutes 
 for it a policy of selfishness, which evades 
 responsibility for the fate of our fellow men. 
 After Cain slew Abel, the Lord said unto Cain, 
 "Where is Abel thy brother.?" And he said, 
 "I know not: Am I my brother's keeper?'" 
 
10 GERMANY vs, CIVILIZATION 
 
 So ancient and of such bad eminence is the 
 precedent which tied the official tongue of 
 the United States when the German Cain 
 slew Belgium Li he conscience of our coun- 
 trymen sent ' i inquiry to Washington, 
 ** Where is Belgium?'' and the silence at the 
 White House mutely echoed Cain's reply, 
 "I know not: Am I my brother's keeper?" 
 
 # 
 
 
 sw..^ <u«*iS/'^*" 
 
 \ 
 
CHAPTER II 
 
 REALITY OR MIRAGE? 
 
 If we could only alter the Germans after the model of the 
 English, if we could only have less philosophy and more 
 power of action, less theory and more practice, we might 
 obtain a good share of redemption, without waiting for the 
 personal majesty of a second Christ. 
 
 EcKERMANN, Conversations with Goethe. March 12, 1828. 
 
 [Bohn Translation, p. 319.] 
 
 BEFORE I proceed to trace the stages by 
 which the ancient pagan ideals revived 
 in Prussia, and how Prussia then diffused them 
 — a moral Prussic acid — through Germany, 
 I wish to recall that other Germany which 
 many men and women not yet past middle 
 age remember with affection and now with 
 the regret born of a tragic disillusion. 
 
 Throughout the nineteenth century Ger- 
 many was one of the chief fountains from 
 which the English-speaking world drew most 
 largely its supplies of philosophy and erudi- 
 tion ; and of poetry, too, because the poetry of 
 
12 GERMANY vs. CIVILIZATION 
 
 Germany's Golden Age, produced by Lessing, 
 Goethe, and Schiller, and by half a dozen 
 balladists and lyric singers, came like a reve- 
 lation, or new message, from Apollo to his 
 devotees beyond the Alps and the Rhine and 
 the Atlantic. 
 
 Coleridge, if not the earliest, was the first 
 far-carrying voice to interpret German 
 thought, and especially German philosophy, 
 in England; but it was Carlyle, the might- 
 iest of modern British advocates — persist- 
 ent, indomitable, dynamic, uncompromisingly 
 computing all deeds in terms of righteousness, 
 with a fund of indignation and of humor un- 
 matched among the Germans whom he intro- 
 duced to English readers — Carlyle it was 
 who raised a marvelous shrine to Goethe and 
 to German ideals. It is hardly too much to say 
 that for a considerable time Goethe was as the 
 sun by which many persons lived their lives by 
 day, and Kant was the moon by which they 
 moved among the ultimate mysteries which 
 enshroud man as by night. The springs of 
 
REALITY OR MIRAGE? 13 
 
 Poesy became intermittent and then dry — 
 Heine, the latest, limpid, sparkling, swift, 
 ironical, melodious. But Philosophy flowed in 
 ever-swelling streams — Hegel, whose intoxi- 
 cating draughts caused his disciples to see 
 equivalence in things good and bad, black 
 and white, life and death, interchangeable 
 and therefore the same ; and then Fichte and 
 Schelling and Schleiermacher; then darker and 
 darker streams, till we reach the inky pool of 
 Schopenhauer. Let the waters be what they 
 might, however, the thirsty world drank of 
 them eagerly, and it came to think of Ger- 
 many as the land whose people were so ab- 
 sorbed in philosophizing about where man 
 came from and whither he was going, that they 
 paid little heed to his actual present state. 
 
 Erudition also kept even pace at first with 
 Philosophy, and then distanced it, and in- 
 cluded it among the topics of erudite research. 
 While the Germans discovered few first prin- 
 ciples, they were most nimble in seizing foreign 
 discoveries and in elaborating these through 
 
14 GERMANY vs. CIVILIZATION 
 
 every variation. They organized, if they did 
 not invent, a method of education, using that 
 word in its broadest sense, by which they re- 
 duced learning to a system as admirably classi- 
 fied as the best book of reference. In dealing 
 with ideas, they usually became doctrinaires; 
 in each German brain one idea and only one 
 grew at a time, like the plant or flower in a pot. 
 This promoted that single-mindedness which 
 lies behind German thoroughness. It has its 
 defects, of course ; one sometimes is bored by 
 doctrinaire companions; it leads to Philistin- 
 ism — *'The Germans," said Goethe, "cannot 
 cease to be Philistines"; ^ and there is always 
 the danger that if the same bad idea be planted 
 in the brains of nearly all the people of a one- 
 ideaed race, there will be uncurbed unanimity 
 for evil when the idea is translated into action. 
 Man and the Devil were joint occupants of the 
 first garden, and the Devil has not yet lost his 
 cunning as a horticulturist. Nevertheless, in 
 dealing with facts, particularly with the facts 
 
 * Eckermann, Conversations, p. 353. 
 
REALITY OR MIRAGE? 15 
 
 of physics, chemistry, and philology, the eru- 
 dite Germans made objectivity their stand- 
 ard, and strove to depersonalize themselves so 
 completely that the faculty by which they 
 observed might actually see the Ding an sick, 
 — the thing in itself, — beyond the idea of it 
 which alone enters human consciousness. 
 
 Foreigners sought the learning which the 
 German universities gave, and they went in 
 such increasing numbers, that from the last 
 quarter of the century onward they literally 
 swarmed at the chief institutions ; and as these 
 students were unusually hungry for knowl- 
 edge, they devoured avidly what was offered 
 them, becoming enthusiastic disciples of the 
 German method and of the professors who 
 taught it. Quite naturally, they looked back 
 with affection upon the German environment 
 amid which was planted their particular Tree 
 of Knowledge. Note however, that until after 
 1870 the universities they most frequented 
 were non-Prussian: so the Germans with 
 whom they came into friendly relations were 
 
i6 GERMANY vs. CIVILIZATION 
 
 not Prussians, but Saxons and Rhinelanders, 
 Suabians and Bavarians. 
 
 Among these, far into the century, life 
 seemed easy-going. Each State had its army 
 and its police and its punctilio, but they had 
 not yet been standardized to the rigid ma- 
 chine-like pattern of Prussia. Indeed, the 
 other Germans still dared to regard Prussia as 
 the more cultivated Greeks used to regard 
 Macedonia, and they openly ridiculed Berlin 
 and the Berliners. Little cities like Diisseldorf 
 and Stuttgart, large cities like Dresden and 
 Munich, cultivated the arts. There was good 
 music ever)rwhere, and even small towns main- 
 tained a theatre where not only the classic 
 German dramas, but also translations of 
 Shakespeare and Moliere were produced. 
 
 The traveler from England or America 
 found much to amuse him in the German beds 
 and mysterious bedclothes; in the cooking, 
 with its inexhaustible supply of ham, sausage, 
 and sauerkraut ; in the beer gardens, where the 
 girth of the habitues swelled visibly, as they 
 
REALITY OR MIRAGES 17 
 
 poured down quart after quart of black or 
 yellow beer: in the way in which men kissed 
 each other on every occasion, and in their 
 pompous taking off of hats and "having the 
 honor" whenever they met. The foreigner 
 noted also their porcelain stoves, on whose 
 hospitable tops babies were kept from freezing 
 on coldest nights, and the table manners, from 
 which he inferred that it was easier for a 
 learned German to discover a new asteroid or 
 a new chemical element, than the use of a fork. 
 In these and a hundred other superficial dif- 
 ferences, not to mention the amazing cos- 
 tumes, the foreigner's sense of humor was 
 constantly stirred. 
 
 But more serious aspects checkered his 
 amusement. He wondered, especially if he 
 came from America, at the extent to which 
 German men had shifted the heavy burdens 
 upon women. If he took a very early start, he 
 saw from the window of his carriage the peas- 
 ant women trudging out with great baskets 
 on their backs to their work in the fields; and 
 
i8 GERMANY vs, CIVILIZATION 
 
 at twilight he saw them trudging home, bent 
 under the loaded baskets — while the men, 
 carrying only a mattock or a scythe, smoking 
 their porcelain-bowled pipes, plodded leisurely 
 behind them. When he reached his pension 
 he was startled — and at first he probably 
 blushed — to see his heavy trunk loaded on 
 the back of a housemaid, who carried it up 
 three or four flights of stairs to his room. And 
 so he never became quite accustomed to the 
 sight of a woman and dog harnessed together, 
 drawing a cart of milk cans and stopping from 
 house to house, while the husband delivered 
 the milk to his customers. "We have never 
 taken quite the same view of women that you 
 Americans do," Bismarck said to an American. 
 But after all, the traveler of three- or four- 
 score years ago generally accepted the un- 
 pleasant or distressing conditions in a foreign 
 country as part of the landscape for which he 
 was not responsible; and his impression of 
 Germany, as he saw it on the surface, was of a 
 widespread, stolid contentment and of a sort 
 
REALITY OR MIRAGE? 19 
 
 of bovine comfort. The literacy of the com- 
 mon people surprised him ; as well it might, for 
 his bootblack had studied Greek and his cabby- 
 read Hegel, and even the peasant swains and 
 lassies quoted Heine's love lyrics at each other: 
 at least, he heard such statements from the 
 intellectuals with whom he associated. The 
 intellectuals themselves not merely enjoyed 
 music — it was as indispensable to their daily 
 life as books were. Every one in the family 
 sang or played, and to attend concerts and 
 the opera was not a luxury, to be indulged 
 in sparingly, but a necessary, to be taken as 
 regularly as one's food. 
 
 Foreign students, when they went home, 
 bearing their doctors' diplomas like Olympic 
 garlands, were the most enthusiastic praisers 
 of German life. They forgot the unrestrained 
 drinking and open dissoluteness which every 
 student was expected to indulge in ; but they 
 remembered with gratitude their great obliga- 
 tions to their professors and the kindness of 
 the professors' families; perhaps, also, tlieir 
 
20 GERMANY vs. CIVILIZATION 
 
 flirtations with flaxen-haired Dorotheas. Ma- 
 turer observers described the Germans as a 
 rather slow, heavy people, industrious, not 
 disguising their self-esteem, taking all sub- 
 jects (humor included) with scientific seri- 
 ousness, sentimental, romantic and doctri- 
 naire. And since their manners were crude, it 
 was assumed that the Germans must be hon- 
 est ; it being a popular fallacy of long standing 
 everywhere that rustic uncouthness and ignor- 
 ance of the ways of the world bespeak native 
 innocence and virtue. So, by an amusing 
 twist of induction, bad manners or none are 
 accepted as outward signs of inward grace. 
 
 The non-Prussians did not appear war- 
 loving : on the contrary, while each State kept 
 up an army, this seemed less with a view to 
 make war than to provide an imposing display 
 at parades and public ceremonies, and to give 
 the nobles something to do. The little town 
 of Weimar filled a much larger space in the 
 thoughts and enthusiasm of those Germans 
 than did the entire great Kingdom of Prussia; 
 
REALITY OR MIRAGE? 21 
 
 and although Weimar had become only a 
 whispering gallery for memories of Goethe and 
 Schiller and their friends, it was the Mecca to 
 which Germans and foreigners made their 
 pilgrimage. And other quiet towns — Jena, 
 Gottingen, Heidelberg, Bonn — enjoyed a 
 reputation for intellectual leadership in com- 
 parison with which militarist pride still 
 seemed second rate, if not vulgar. Down be- 
 yond 1870, the Germans placed Goethe far 
 above Frederick the Great as the exponent of 
 the highest German ideals. 
 
 The outside world thought of the non-Prus- 
 sians, therefore, not as a race of fighters, but of 
 thinkers, scholars, visionaries, fed on pigmeat 
 and beer, careful tradesmen, docile peasants, 
 and masterful musicians. So conspicuous was 
 the visionary trait in them that until the mid- 
 dle of the century the Germans regarded them- 
 selves as irresolute. "Is Germany Hamlet?" 
 — a question asked by one of their popular 
 writers in the forties — was repeated and seri- 
 ously discussed. Had excess of thought para- 
 
22 GERMANY vs. CIVILIZATION 
 
 lyzed the will to act? The political ineptitude 
 of the non-Prussian States seemed to spring 
 from an enfeebled will; and those States, after 
 submitting with comparatively little resent- 
 ment to the hegemony of Austria, passed with 
 mixed emotions under the control of Prussia. 
 Not until the Prussian will energized them did 
 the non- Prussian Germans loom up as Moloch 
 worshipers, thirsting for world-empire. 
 
 I wish to seek the sources of that meta- 
 morphosis; to discover how far it was due to 
 the imposing of the vastly more dynamic Prus- 
 sian will on the German, and how far to the 
 calling back to life of certain atavistic passions 
 common to the ancestors of Teutonic stock. 
 When a middle-aged man, burly and gruff but 
 at heart not cruel, who has led outwardly a 
 rather commonplace yet respected life, and 
 has shown marked talents for several high 
 objects, suddenly professes fiendish principles 
 and proceeds to carry them out with a deliri- 
 ous enjoyment, we turn to his family record 
 for earlier maniacal outbursts. Alienists, no 
 
REALITY OR MIRAGE? 23 
 
 longer believing that Cains develop in the 
 twinkling of an eye, consult heredity. Who 
 can set a limit to the longevity of atavism? 
 Seeds of corn taken from an Egyptian tomb, 
 and planted now, germinate after four thou- 
 sand years : may it be that ferocious instincts, 
 which flourished in savage forerunners, can 
 revive and overcome their descendants after 
 the lapse of many generations ? 
 
 The reader may cherish a still more glowing 
 recollection of Germany than this which I 
 have outlined ; if he does — and he may well 
 find reasons for it — he will feel with increased 
 amazement the dark contrast between past 
 and present. 
 
CHAPTER III 
 
 ATAVISM 
 
 "From these old-German gloomy times," said Goethe, 
 "we can obtain as little as from the Servian songs, and 
 similar barbaric popular poetry. Wc can read it and be 
 interested about it for a while, but merely to cast it aside, 
 and let it lie behind us. Generally speaking, a man is quite 
 sufficiently saddened by his own passions and destiny, and 
 need not make himself more so by the darkness of a bar- 
 baric past. He needs enlightening and cheering influences, 
 and should therefore turn to those eras in art and literature 
 during which remarkable men obtained perfect culture, so 
 that they were satisfied with themselves, and able to im- 
 part to others the blessings of their culture." 
 
 EcKERMANN, Conversations y October 3, 1828, p. 327. 
 
 WHAT of the German Cain who sud- 
 denly arose at the opening of the 
 twentieth century, gigantic, merciless, mad 
 with the purpose of slaying the small and fee- 
 ble, of subduing the powerful whose spoils he 
 coveted, of shattering the civilization which 
 embodies the cumulative ideals of three thou- 
 sand years, and of setting up his own civiliza- 
 tion in its stead? 
 
ATAVISM 25 
 
 The Goths and Vandals and Huns who peo- 
 pled Germany early in the Christian era, were ./ 
 as unqualified Barbarians as Apache Indians. 
 They had anjnsatiable_appetite for war; and "t 
 this was whetted when they came into conflict 
 with the Romans, because by war alone could 
 they defend themselves and then make their 
 inroads into the crumbling Roman Empire 
 and secure its wealth. Even after they gained 
 the mastery and had mixed their blood freely 
 with that of the decadent peoples which Rome 
 once swayed, they kept to an extraordinary 
 degree the traits which dominated their ances- 
 tors when history first describes them. One of 
 ^. those traits, blood-thirstiness, crops out at 
 intervals during all their subsequent annals, as 
 surely as pieriodic dipsomania recurs to mad- 
 den its victim. The beheading by Charle- 
 magne of a multitude of Saxons at Verden 
 was one manifestation of it ; internecine war, 
 accompanied by incredible horrors and pro- 
 longed during thirty years, was another; th^ 
 devastation o£Belgium_aii(^^ 
 
26 GERMANY vs. CIVILIZATION 
 
 France in 1914 was the latest. At the smell of 
 blood, the Furor Tcutonicus, proverbial for its 
 wildness, has always been kindled. 
 
 Among the German Barbarians a spirit of 
 vassalage also appears in the earliest accounts 
 we have of them. **The chief fights for vic- 
 tory," says Tacitus; "his vassals fight for their 
 chief. If their native state sinks into the sloth 
 of prolonged peace and repose, many of its 
 noble youths voluntarily seek those tribes 
 which are waging some war: both because in- 
 action is odious to their race, and because they 
 win renown more readily in the midst of peril, 
 and cannot maintain a numerous following 
 except by violence and war. . . . Nor are they 
 as easily persuaded to plough the earth and to 
 wait for a year's produce, as to challenge an 
 enemy and earn the honor of wounds. Nay, 
 they actually think it tame and stupid to ac- 
 quire by the sweat of toil what they might 
 win by their blood.'* ^ 
 
 » Tacitus, Germania, chap, xiv (Church and Brodribb*s 
 translation). 
 
ATAVISM 27 
 
 Far from resenting vassalage, the Germans 
 rejoiced in it: and in due time this spirit de- 
 veloped into Feudalism, the highest political 
 conception which the Teutons have yet been 
 able to devise. Elaborated a thousand years 
 ago, it expressed so clearly, so frankly, so com- 
 pletely the Teutonic ideal, that in spite of 
 changing outward conditions, it reappears to- 
 day, under different name and outward dis- 
 guise, as the utmost aim of the Germans. 
 
 Feudalism classified society into layers as 
 rigidly as the steps of a pyramid rise from the 
 base to the apex: at the bottom, slaves and 
 serfs; at the top, the monarch. Except at the 
 two extremes, the occupants of each layer not 
 only looked up to those above them, but 
 looked down on those beneath ; and the satis- 
 faction of looking down more than compen- 
 sated for the irksomeness of looking up. The 
 only liberty the German really coveted was 
 the liberty of being and doing on his social 
 plane just what every other dweller on that 
 plane was and did. The habit of looking up 
 
28 GERMANY vs. CIVILIZATION 
 
 intensified his innate submissiveness — a sub- 
 missiveness expressed in Feudal terms by the 
 loyalty of man to master, of vassal to lord. 
 When he came to regard the monarch, it was 
 with a reverence, unreasoning and absolute, 
 which worshipers in other lands reserved for 
 the Deity. 
 
 As the control of the monarch slackened, 
 until it became hardly more than a political 
 theory, the power of his chief vassals increased 
 and they in turn aspired to be absolute 
 monarchs in their several spheres, — princes, 
 dukes, marquises, counts, — each holding te- 
 naciously his independence, and each receiv- 
 ing from his subjects the worship they had 
 once paid to the supreme sovereign. Germany 
 was split up into many states, large and small, 
 whose quarrels, whose striving for predomi- 
 nance, whose dynastic rivalries comprise an 
 unedifying history for several centuries. We 
 cannot understand the German Reformation 
 itself if we look upon it simply as the effort of a 
 new religion to supplant an old one: we must 
 
ATAVISM 29 
 
 know how far political or family ambition 
 caused each German ruler to cling to the old 
 or to espouse the new. 
 
 Throughout this long evolution from Ro- 
 man to recent times, amid all changes, the two 
 /traits which I have called blood-thirstiness and )_X- 
 submissiveness persisted. Wherever the Ger- L^ 
 mans fought, they fought with a savage relish 
 of fighting, and they never lost the instinct / 
 ' which made them accept docilely orders from / 
 above. Slow, stolid, patient, persevering, they 
 plodded on. Even as late as the eighteenth 
 century they seemed almost to stagnate; no 
 effective, unifying control bound the Pumper- 
 nickel States together; and as the princelings 
 lacked initiative, their subjects could not sup- 
 ply it. In civilization, so far as this expresses 
 itself in manners and in social conduct, the 
 Germans were centuries behind their neigh- 
 bors in Western Europe. Manners, indeed, 
 seem always to have been beyond their reach ; 
 whether from a native obtuseness, which ren- 
 ders them dull to the charm of courtesy and 
 
30 GERMANY vs. CIVILIZATION 
 
 high breeding, or from deliberate Chauvinism, 
 which holds that, as bad manners are German 
 and good manners are foreign, it would be 
 unpatriotic and an admission of inferiority, to 
 replace the indigenous product by an exotic. 
 Now arose, however, a leader in Germany. 
 The House of HohenzoUern, sprung from 
 ■ medieval highwaymen, — their name suggests 
 high-toll-taking gentry, — had come down 
 from the mountains of South Germany and 
 acquired, by successive marriages or con- 
 quests, possessions in the Rhineland and the 
 Margravate of Brandenburg. In due time the 
 Elector of Brandenburg created himself King 
 of Prussia, the least civilized of all the German 
 States. But those men of the Northeast, 
 sprung from Slavic, Teutonic, and it may be 
 in part from remote Asiatic strains, kept the 
 traits which had made their predecessors for- 
 midable when the Christian era was young: 
 and when one of the most masterful of modem 
 despots awakened and drilled and led them, 
 they responded with the wild joy possible only 
 
ATAVISM 31 
 
 to those who revert, after ages of disuse, to 
 their atavistic propensities. 
 
 Frederick the Great taught not only the 
 Prussians, but all other Germans, that the 
 strength and very existence of a nation such 
 
 ' as he planned depend upon its Army. Virtue, 
 literature, art, science, invention, industry, are 
 subordinate; the Army is indispensable, su- 
 
 ^'preme. "Righteousness," said Solomon, "ex- 
 alteth a nation." The only exaltation which 
 Frederick relied upon or preached was that 
 of military Might. Frederick had no scruples, 
 and being backed by a sufficient force of Pom- 
 eranian grenadiers, he did not need them. He 
 was perfidious, he robbed, he persecuted, he 
 lied; but as his Army was stronger than that 
 of his adversaries he prospered. He laughed 
 at the suggestion that the Divine Vengeance 
 would repay the wicked. Had he not stolen 
 Silesia? Had he not joined in vivisecting Po- 
 land? If Divine Vengeance slept on while 
 he was perpetrating such crimes, it must be 
 either a myth or a nonentity; and as Frederick 
 
32 GERMANY vs. CIVILIZATION 
 
 respected realities only, an absentee avenger, 
 or a God whose traces were only dimly discov- 
 erable in the Old Testament, had no terrors 
 for him. 
 
 The Hohenzollerns who succeeded Frederick 
 were brutish, but this would not have mat- 
 tered if they had been competent. The Prus- 
 sian Army deteriorated. Napoleon humbled 
 Germany and stamped on its map the names 
 of three great French victories, Jena, Eylau 
 and Friedland. Then came the uprising, when 
 at Leipsic the Germans, assisted by the Rus- 
 sians, Austrians, Bavarians, Swedes, and Brit- 
 ish, broke Napoleon's power. After Waterloo, 
 they enjoyed again independence from foreign 
 dictation, dearer to them than internal liberty. 
 And yet the seeds of Liberty which the French 
 Republic sowed throughout Europe sprang up 
 during the next decades and they burst into 
 brief flowering, in the revolution of 1848-49. 
 Even in Prussia, the masses rose to secure 
 constitutional freedom, and frightened Prince 
 William into an ignominious flight. Presently 
 
ATAVISM 33 
 
 Reaction triumphed: the Liberals were de- 
 feated ; their leaders either fled to America or 
 were shot; the very name of Liberty was 
 silenced. 
 
 And now a Prussian greater than Frederick 
 rose up to steady Prussia's shaky nerves, to 
 make Prussia mistress of Germany and Ger- 
 many arbitress of Europe. To these ends Bis- 
 marck revived the Army as the necessary 
 material weapon ; but he relied also upon Di- 
 plomacy, which he practiced with no more 
 scruples than Machiavelli taught his Prince to 
 observe. By guile he trumped up a pretext for 
 dismembering Denmark ; by craft he inveigled 
 Austria to join in that crime; by cunning he 
 then forced Austria to fight for their common 
 spoil; by the falsified Ems dispatch he infuri- 
 ated France into declaring the war on Prussia 
 which he had been secretly instigating for 
 years. These were the methods by which he 
 created the German Empire : this was the im- 
 perious statesman whom the Germans revere. 
 Fit is it that the Prussian ideal should have 
 
34 GERMANY vs, CIVILIZATION 
 
 been embodied in Frederick the Great and in 
 Bismarck — men whose genius would have 
 had no play unless the millions of Germans 
 whom they mastered had been living on a 
 moral level where such methods were accepted 
 as ideal. 
 
 Over against Frederick and Bismarck let us 
 set two incarnations of American ideals, — 
 George Washington, the contemporary of 
 Frederick, and Abraham Lincoln, the con- 
 temporary of Bismarck. They, too, wrought 
 to create a nation and to preserve and unify it 
 — but their work was modern ; their principle 
 was Liberty; their methods were moral and 
 humane: whereas Frederick might have been 
 the twin of Gaiseric, the Vandal, and Bis- 
 marck, the brother of Brennus, the Gaul. 
 "Fae victis! " "Woe to the conquered!" 
 Brennus shouted as he threw his sword into 
 the scales on which, in B.C. 389, the Romans 
 were heaping their ransom. " Fae victis!'' was 
 Bismarck's motto, when he extorted his in- 
 demnity from strangled France in a.d. 1871. 
 
ATAVISM 35 
 
 Twenty-three centuries separated Brennus 
 from Bismarck, but the Prussian ideal had 
 not advanced beyond that of the Barbarian 
 Gaul. 
 
 Bismarck saw, however, that something 
 more than a large army, magnificently drilled, 
 would be needed to maintain Prussian ascend- 
 ancy in the German Empire. Although he re- 
 garded readiness for war as undebatable, he 
 was too adept a statesman not to resent a 
 little the assumption of the militarists that the 
 State must be organized to serve the will of the 
 Army, and that the Army must be called in to 
 settle every international dispute. Bismarck 
 knew that in his hands Diplomacy, without 
 shedding a drop of blood, had won campaigns 
 hardly less important to Prussia than those of 
 Sadowa or Sedan. Why resort to a surgical 
 operation at every moment, when the pharma- 
 copoeia of Diplomacy — bread pills, perhaps 
 even hypnotism or a little poison — would 
 serve .? 
 
 The Teutonic lust for war having been de- 
 
36 GERMANY vs, CIVILIZATION 
 
 veloped to an unprecedented degree, Bismarck 
 now set about evoking the spirit of vassalage 
 — that other immemorial Teutonic heirloom. 
 Responding to modern conditions, this took 
 the form of a capacity for obedience and a sub- 
 missiveness to discipline unexampled among 
 any civilized race into whose ears the word 
 Liberty had ever been whispered. 
 
CHAPTER IV 
 
 MANIPULATING TEUTONIC TRAITS 
 
 Seest thou a man wise in his own conceit? There is more 
 hope of a fool than of him. Proverbs, xxvi, 12. 
 
 UNIVERSAL military service not only 
 
 A 
 
 standardized German experience, by 
 subjecting all German men during their im- 
 pressionable years to the same sort of life and 
 to a uniform drill, but it also deepened in them 
 that atavistic craving for discipline, and that 
 capacity for obedience, which made them both 
 obsequious towards those above them and 
 insolent towards those below. They lacked 
 initiative: but they were patient, thorough, 
 easily satisfied if they had sufficient sausage 
 and beer for their stomachs and music for their 
 ears. These Teutonic masses, which resemble 
 in so many points the Chinese rather than any 
 European race, were slowly organized into a 
 machine as vast as Germany itself. 
 V In industry, agriculture, and commerce dis- 
 
38 GERMANY vs. CIVILIZATION 
 
 cipline similar to that in the Army was estab- 
 lished. Education came under the iron rule. 
 The State subsidized the opera houses and the- 
 atres. There was no art, but there were many- 
 painters and sculptors who looked to official 
 patrons for recognition. When the site of Ber- 
 lin is again a wilderness for four-footed wolves 
 and wild boars, the elephantine monstrosities 
 which William II set up in the Siegesallee, to 
 glorify his HohenzoUern forerunners, may 
 remain to enlighten posterity as to the artistic 
 sense of the Prussians when they decided to 
 go forth and subjugate the world. The State 
 Church had long been fossilized : in the Roman 
 Church the Jesuits flourished. 
 
 Little by little the university professors, 
 some through blandishments, some through 
 rebukes and snubs, some by their own undis- 
 guised preference, became a wheel of the State 
 machine. The professorial class, bred for the 
 most part from the bourgeoisie , inherited the in- 
 born German reverence for the titled classes, 
 and its members were easily flattered by the 
 
TEUTONIC TRAITS 39 
 
 bestowal of the Red Eagle or by the call to 
 a chair at Berlin, and many a waverer seems 
 to have been won over by a few condescending 
 remarks from the Kaiser. Men formerly re- 
 nowned for their independence now spoke the 
 words they were expected to speak, and de- 
 voted their carefully trained intellects to dis- 
 covering and proclaiming reasons for idolizing 
 a regime which they had once abhorred. The 
 deliberate perversion of the German universi- 
 ties by the Kaiser dealt a blow to the honor 
 and scientific prestige of German professors 
 from which they cannot soon recover. Poster- 
 ity will judge them as it judges the Inquisitors 
 who did the bidding of Philip 11. On which the 
 heavier blame, the corrupter, or those who 
 eagerly allowed themselves to be corrupted? 
 Only one element in Germany, the Socialists, 
 threatened for a brief time to accept no recon- 
 ciliation with the Imperial Despotism. Their 
 chief prophet, Marx, it should never be for- 
 gotten, had been obliged years earlier to seek 
 shelter for his life and freedom for his utter- 
 
40 GERMANY vs. CIVILIZATION 
 
 ances in England — England, hated by Ger- 
 man Junkers and war-maniacs, not to mention 
 Bismarck, the colossal Junker, and William II, 
 the son of an English mother. Bismarck first 
 tried persecution on the Socialists, and passed 
 laws against them not less frightful than those 
 which the Spanish Torquemada enforced 
 against heretics ; but when he saw the Social- 
 ists thrive under persecution, he adopted other 
 tactics. He turned the flank of the Socialist 
 movement by introducing a system which 
 made Socialism dependent on the State. So 
 the last organ which might possibly have 
 served for whatever minority in Germany 
 cherished Democratic or at least non-despotic 
 ideals, was mitred into the despotic machine. 
 Army and Navy, the Court, the far-reaching 
 commercial and industrial interests, the banks, 
 the press, the Church, the teachers and pro- 
 fessors, the subsidized steamship lines, the 
 railways, the Krupp factories, the Socialists, 
 worked together as co-ordinate if not co-equal 
 parts of the State. 
 
TEUTONIC TRAITS 41 
 
 In theory this State was an abstraction ex- 
 isting "above Society or the individual" — 
 Germany, the Fatherland of all Germans, the 
 ideal to which every German should conse- 
 crate himself; and the world will long marvel 
 at the cunning by which the small Ring, which 
 invented and worked this stupendous machine, 
 caused the various parts of it to believe that 
 they were each serving an ideal, when they 
 were really serving that Ring. The real State 
 was no abstraction : it was the Kaiser, the mili- 
 tary clique, the Junker aristocracy, and their 
 counterparts in other German proyinces. 
 
 The German nation, obedient to the point 
 of servility, seldom questioned what it was 
 ordered to believe. If a few centrifugal per- 
 sons ventured to criticize, they were quickly 
 jailed. But the millions accepted their lot 
 more than gladly, because they were convinced 
 that the German Empire surpassed all others, 
 and that the Germans — that is, themselves 
 — were superior to any other race, past or 
 present. 
 
42 GERMANY vs, CIVILIZATION 
 
 A spindle is but a spindle, though it work in 
 the largest mill in the world; but the most 
 insignificant German seemed to swell with the 
 largeness of the entire German Empire. Self- 
 conceit is an attribute of children and savages, 
 in whom naivete somewhat softens its repul- 
 siveness. We are inclined to see only humor 
 when a child or a Polynesian, out of his nar- 
 row experience, speaks boastfully. Men of 
 genius, and especially men who imagined 
 without sufficient warrant that they had ge- 
 nius, have also often been puffed up with self- 
 esteem : but even among them the old fashion 
 has changed, and they usually simulate mod- 
 esty though they have it not. In a period like 
 the Renaissance, when individualism ran riot 
 and collapsed in hysteria, egotistic vanity 
 flourished naked and unabashed. 
 
 One sign of a civilized nature, however, is 
 self-knowledge; and self-knowledge teaches 
 either an individual or a State that there are 
 other individuals and other States, very dif- 
 ferent, it may be, but possessing qualities as 
 
TEUTONIC TRAITS 43 
 
 excellent as those of their rivals. Difference 
 does not necessarily imply inferiority; nor is 
 self-reverence to be confounded with conceit. 
 We should love our country and should be 
 prepared to sacrifice our lives at the call of 
 patriotism; but never should this love mislead 
 us into thinking that ours is the only coun- 
 try, or the best. True patriotism is rather a 
 passion like that which we feel for our family 
 and friends, and no more depends on geo- 
 graphic or economic externals than the love 
 of a child for its mother depends upon her 
 beauty or her wealth. 
 
 Self-esteem has been so salient a character- 
 istic of the Teutons, and especially of the Prus- 
 sians, since the earliest times, that we may 
 assume it to be innate in them. Perhaps it was 
 sharpened when as Barbarians they swarmed 
 into the civilization of the Roman Empire. 
 They had no great cities, no marble temples, 
 no Senate houses, no towering and luxurious 
 baths; and so they pretended to scorn them, 
 and to magnify their own barbaric dwellings 
 
4^ GERMANY vs. CIVILIZATION 
 
 and manners and customs. At any rate, their 
 conceit survived every vicissitude. 
 
 The forays which the medieval German 
 kings made recurrently into Italy did not, by 
 introducing the Germans to peoples more civ- 
 ilized than themselves, suggest to them that 
 their own ways and natures could be improved 
 upon. Even the Reformation, which promised 
 at the outset to give Germany not only leader- 
 ship, but really close relations with the other 
 Powers, soon became local, having in each 
 country its peculiar form and special aims ; so 
 that the German States, disunited, discordant, 
 dull, fell back into that parochial frame of 
 mind in which egotism flourishes. It is a nice 
 question whether egotism is more insufferable 
 in those who are down or those who are up; 
 the Prussians were equally arrogant, whether 
 in victory or in defeat. 
 
 Frederick the Great sent to France for exem- 
 plars of civilized wit and manners; he spoke 
 French, he wrote French; but his loyal sub- 
 jects never took this as a hint that they were 
 
V 
 
 TEUTONIC TRAITS 45 
 
 less civilized than the French, and Frederick 
 himself did not object to their dulness and 
 bad manners so long as they furnished him 
 the docile soldiei^ J!r»d bureaucrats whom he 
 needed. 
 
 We can hardly lay too njich stress on the 
 German self-conceit as an important element 
 in bringing Germany to the condition where 
 she would embark exultingly in the Atrocious 
 War. After 1870, a modest Prussian would 
 have been an anachronism. The Empire stood 
 at the head of Europe; its scholars led the 
 world. It extended applied science, not only 
 into the larger domain of industry, but into 
 the concerns of daily life. It perfected, piece 
 by piece, the immense machine, of which the 
 Kaiser held the throttle. And when the word 
 went forth from above that the Germans were 
 the Chosen People, before whom a destiny of 
 illimitable grandeur opened, hardly a German 
 skeptic challenged that announcement, which 
 merely confirmed what each of them and his 
 ancestors had taken for granted, since Her- 
 
46 GERMANY vs. CIVILIZATION 
 
 mann vanquished the Romans in the Teuto 
 burg forest. To keep playing on the chord of 
 egotism, which set every Teuton heart vibrat- 
 ing, was the obvious policy of the Imperial 
 Ring. 
 
CHAPTER V 
 
 THE KAISER AND GOTT PARTNERSHIP 
 
 He created Gott in his own image. 
 
 BUT for the presence of William II, the 
 ambition of the Imperial Ring might 
 have waited long before it embarked recklessly 
 on a world-war in order to gratify its ambition. 
 We cannot yet say — perhaps posterity will 
 never be able to determine — how far the 
 Kaiser was unwittingly the tool of the Ring 
 and how far he shaped it to his own purposes. 
 At least we may be sure that the Ring would 
 have thwarted him unless it had found him 
 satisfactory. Had he attempted to establish a 
 free government, for instance, his path would 
 have been blocked by Junkers; or if he had 
 acceded to the proposal of the other great 
 Powers to restrict armament, he would not 
 have been popular with the German military 
 caste. 
 But there was never any likelihood that he 
 
48 GERMANY vs. CIVILIZATION 
 
 would do these or any other Liberal acts. He 
 was a Hohenzollern through and through — 
 one of the Hohenzollerns on whose stem the 
 shoot of semi-savage Prussianism, grafted 
 centuries before, had grown luxuriantly. His 
 .^iirst object was to Prussianize Germany; his 
 next, to Germanize the world. Versatile and 
 neurotic, his conceit soon developed into un- 
 checked egomania. At the outset, the minute 
 German specialists smiled when he laid down 
 the law to them in Biblical criticism, or in 
 painting, in history, or in army tactics, or in a 
 hundred other fields; but after a while they 
 listened to him gravely, as to Sir Oracle. 
 Their obsequiousness, which cost them little, 
 brought them his favors for themselves and his 
 backing for their enterprises. He Prussianized 
 Germany in ways I have already hinted at, 
 until the reluctant Bavarians or the suspicious 
 Wiirtembergers came to regard Imperial Ger- 
 man aggrandizement as the leading tenet in 
 their patriotic creed. 
 William's egomania revolved on two wheels 
 
KAISER AND GOTT 49 
 
 — War and Statesmanship. The achieve- 
 ments of Napoleon as a soldier and of Bis- 
 marck as a statesman would not let him sleep. 
 To the dire misfortune of Europe, he believed 
 that he united in himself the genius of both 
 those consummate men : and this he sought to 
 demonstrate by his acts. He chose a succes- 
 sion of mediocrities as his Chancellors, with 
 the result that the policies pursued were his 
 policies. Bismarck had advised Germany to 
 keep on friendly terms with Russia and with 
 England ; William antagonized both England 
 and Russia without any apparent compensa- 
 tion, and accustomed the German people to 
 the idea that England was an enemy that must 
 be destroyed, and Russia a peril that must be 
 removed. He used France as a pretext for 
 augmenting the German Army, bullying her 
 to the verge of desperation, and then saying in 
 substance to the Germans: 'You see what 
 wicked people the French are; how hate cor- 
 rodes their hearts; how revenge is their ruling 
 passion. I am a man of peace, but I shall not 
 
so GERMANY vs. CIVILIZATION 
 
 be able forever to restrain my noble Army 
 from taking up the challenge of these insolent 
 braggarts and making an end of them once 
 for all/ 
 
 *My noble Army!' For a quarter of a cen- 
 tury that was the Kaiser's invariable refrain. 
 To fortify that Army he bent all his plans. He 
 allowed military considerations to control his 
 diplomacy. He made the military caste, whose 
 truculence had long been a by-word, up- 
 permost in the Empire; for like Frederick 
 the Great he knew that the durability of the 
 Hohenzollem dynasty rested on the Army. 
 He need not fear Socialists and Democrats, 
 Anarchists and plain Liberals, so long as he 
 had an Army which at his bidding would 
 shoot down a hundred or a hundred thousand 
 of them. Having secured safety at home, he 
 could turn to his plan for conquest abroad. 
 
 Diplomacy conducted by men infected by 
 the itch of militarism cannot fail to be dena- 
 tured. A manufacturing house which sent out 
 a prize-fighter instead of a persuasive agent to 
 
KAISER AND GOTT 51 
 
 solicit orders and to adjust claims among its 
 clients would soon lack customers. As the 
 Kaiser fostered the Prussian brand of Diplo- 
 macy, which begins by bullying and proceeds 
 through insults to brutality, he could hardly 
 have been surprised to discover, by 19 10, that 
 Germany had no disinterested friend in the 
 world. Several governments were polite to her 
 because they feared her; Austria was her sub- 
 missive vassal, and Turkey gave her a bought 
 amity, which might at any time be shifted to 
 a higher bidder. 
 
 Listen to a few passages of the Gospel ac- 
 cording to William II: — ^ 
 
 It is the soldier and the Army, not parlia- 
 mentary majorities and votes, that have welded 
 the German Empire together. My confidence 
 rests upon the Army. 
 
 The most important heritage which my illus- 
 trious grandfather and father bequeathed to me, 
 
 * These quotations are taken from The War-Lord^ com- 
 piled by J. M. Kennedy. (New York: Duffield & Co. 
 191 4.) See also The German Emperor as shown by his 
 Public Utterances. By C. Gauss. (New York: Scribners. 
 1914.) 
 
52 GERMANY vs. CIVILIZATION 
 
 and which I entered upon with joy and pride, is 
 the Army. 
 
 Wherever the German Eagle has thrust his 
 talons into a country, that country is German 
 and will remain German. 
 
 The problems which proved insoluble to the 
 Holy Roman Empire, the modern German Em- 
 pire is in a position to solve. The means that 
 enables it to do this is our Army. 
 
 Any opposition on the part of Prussian noble- 
 men to their King is a monstrosity. Such opposi- 
 tion can be justified only when the King leads it. 
 
 Our German people will be the granite rock on 
 which Almighty God will complete his building 
 of the civilization of the world. 
 
 Only the German nation is left to defend and 
 above all to cultivate great conceptions. 
 
 The soldier must not have a will of his own. 
 He must have only one will, and that will mine. 
 
 A ruler may be very disagreeable, and I will be 
 disagreeable if I think it necessary. 
 
 There is only one master in this country: I am 
 he, and I will not tolerate another. 
 
 There is only one law — my law; the law 
 which I myself lay down. 
 
 God will be on our side if ever our peaceful 
 work is interrupted. 
 
 Hurrah for the dry powder and the sharp 
 
KAISER AND GOTT 53 
 
 sword, for the end we have in sight and the 
 forces we are bending towards it, for the German 
 Army and the General Staff! 
 
 Proud of the incomparable discipHne and loy- 
 alty of its Army, Germany is resolved, without 
 in any way threatening the rights of others, to 
 maintain its Army at the degree of perfection 
 it thinks necessary for the defense of its inter- 
 ests. 
 
 If we have been at peace for a long time, we 
 owe our good fortune to our well-tried Army as 
 well as to the favor of the Almighty. 
 
 The Army and the Emperor at its head can 
 alone secure the safety of the Empire and the 
 peace of the world. 
 
 Our future lies upon the water. Imperial 
 power means sea power, and sea power and im- 
 perial power are dependent on each other. 
 
 The best word is a blow — the Army and 
 Navy are the pillars of the State. 
 
 We are the salt of the earth; we must show 
 ourselves worthy of our great destiny. 
 
 God liveth as of old. Our great Ally still 
 reigneth, the Holy God, who cannot suifer sin 
 and iniquity to triumph. 
 
 The King of Kings calleth for volunteers for 
 the front. 
 
 If history should mention a German world- 
 
y 
 
 54 GERMANY vs. CIVILIZATION 
 
 power, or a Hohenzollcrn omnlpotency, we do 
 not wish It to be said that it was obtained by the 
 point of the sword, but by the mutual confidence 
 of nations striving for the same ideal. 
 
 To multiply these utterances, dating from 
 different years, would merely show the Kai- 
 ser's fertility in putting the same thoughts in 
 various forms. The specimens quoted sum up 
 his creed. He admonished his German sub- 
 jects, and announced to the world, that he was 
 the King of Kings; that he ruled by Divine 
 Right ; that he held in the hollow of his hand 
 the life and death of every German ; that the 
 Army, with which he gradually associated 
 the Navy, was the supreme institution in the 
 Empire; that the Germans were the Chosen 
 People, who might look forward to winning 
 world-power and even omnipotence ; that God 
 was his Ally, who could be depended on in case 
 of need to promote Imperial German ambi- 
 tion. 
 
 The substance of these doctrines was not 
 original. Many despots, especially those who 
 
KAISER AND GOTT 55 
 
 secretly dreamed of military expansion, have 
 used similar phrases. The Jews were the 
 Chosen People; and so have others declared 
 themselves, with perhaps less justification. 
 Autocrats have always assured their subjects 
 — when, indeed, they condescended to give 
 reasons of any kind — that they enjoyed a 
 monopoly of Divine favor. Napoleon, more 
 modest than the windy Prussian, talked about 
 his "Star," thereby suggesting a sufficiently 
 vague and imaginative idea and one less 
 shocking than "God'* to pious ears. 
 
 William's references to God reveal the bi- 
 zarre medley of his moral nature. He did not 
 need to go to Machiavelli to learn that a prince 
 should use religion as an instrument for inten- 
 sifying his subjects' obedience, or as a cloak 
 to hide his own designs against other princes. 
 William needed only to turn to the "Confes- 
 sions" of Frederick the Great,^ the Prussian 
 
 ^ The Confessions of Frederick the Great and The Life of 
 Frederick the Great hy Heinrich von Treitschke. Edited by 
 D. Sladen; Foreword by G. H. Putnam. (New York: 
 Putnams. 1915.) 
 
S6 GERMANY vs. CIVILIZATION 
 
 Despot whom he most idolized, in order 
 to find expressed with brutal frankness the 
 diabolical creed which William himself has 
 practiced. 
 
 Religion [says Frederick, in the Second Morn- 
 ing of his "Confessions"] is absolutely necessary 
 in a state. ... A king must know very little of 
 politics, indeed, that should suffer his subjects to 
 make a bad use of it; but then it would not be 
 very wise in a king to have any religion himself. 
 Mark well, my dear nephew, what I here say to 
 you; there Is nothing that tyrannizes more over 
 the head and heart than religion; because it 
 neither agrees with our passions, nor with those 
 great political views which a monarch ought to 
 have. The true religion of a prince is his interest 
 and his glory. He ought, by his royal station, to be 
 dispensed from having any other. He may Indeed 
 reserve outwardly a fair occasional appearance, 
 for the sake of amusing those who are about him, 
 or who watch his motions and character. 
 
 If he fears God, or, to speak as the priests and 
 women do, if he fears Hell, like Louis XIV in his 
 old age, he Is apt to become timorous, childish, 
 and fit for nothing but to be a Capuchin. If the 
 point Is to avail himself of a favorable moment 
 for seizing a province, an army of devils, to 
 
KAISER AND GOTT 
 
 57 
 
 defend it, present themselves to his imagination; 
 we are, on that supposition, weak enough to 
 think it an injustice, and we proportion, in our 
 conscience, the punishment to the crime. Should 
 it be necessary to make a treaty with other Pow- 
 ers, if we remember that we are Christians, we 
 are undone; all would be over with us; we should 
 be constantly bubbles. As to war, it is a trade, in 
 which any the least scruple would spoil every- 
 thing, and, indeed, what man of honor would ever 
 make war, if he had not the right to make rules 
 that should authorize plunder, fire, and carnage .f* 
 I do not, however, mean that one should make 
 a proclamation of impiety and atheism; but it 
 is right to adapt one's thoughts to the rank one 
 occupies. All the popes who had common sense 
 have held no principles of religion but what 
 favored their aggrandizement. It would be the 
 silliest thing imaginable, if a prince were to con- 
 fine himself to such paltry trifles as were con- 
 trived only for the common people. Besides, the 
 best way for a prince to keep fanaticism out of 
 his country is for him to have the most cool 
 indifference for religion.^ 
 
 ^ The genuineness of Frederick's Confessions^ or Matt- 
 neeSf as they were called in their first French edition, has 
 been questioned. The passage quoted, however, accords 
 with both his views and practices. 
 
58 GERMANY vs, CIVILIZATION 
 
 The man who thus instructed his nephew as 
 to the use which a king should make of rehgion 
 did not take the trouble to pay the tribute 
 which civilized vice is supposed to pay to vir- 
 tue : how could he, when he neither believed in 
 virtue nor had the faintest conception of its 
 meaning unless it coincided with a despot's 
 plans ? He was no more ashamed of his cynical 
 treatment of the most sacred aspirations pos- 
 sible to man than savages are of their cere- 
 monial orgies or their cannibalism. He was 
 simply Prussian, enunciating the Prussian 
 ideal, which, being Prussian, required no 
 excuse. 
 
 Possessing neither Frederick's intellect nor 
 his thorough-going contempt for mankind, 
 William II was soft enough to like to appear 
 good-natured on occasions when his autocracy 
 was not in question; and even if he had not 
 understood the value of Gott as a device for 
 keeping the people under, he would probably 
 have continued to harp upon Gott in order to 
 gratify the popular instinct. When analyzed, 
 
KAISER AND GOTT 59 
 
 the Prussian deity is seen to be in essence 
 merely tribal, one of the deities of the Teutonic 
 mythology — a combination of Odin and Loki 
 — dressed in the uniform of Colonel of Pom- 
 eranian Grenadiers. This Gott, whom William 
 had for a partner, seems in reality to have been 
 William's double, who approved of the Kai- 
 ser's policies, invariably sided with him in war 
 and peace, and, like William, lauded the Ger- 
 mans as the Chosen People. Though their 
 reverence for the Kaiser would have sufficed 
 to make them obey his commands, they were 
 undoubtedly stimulated in their zeal when he 
 told them that Gott thought just as he did. 
 They could neither see nor hear the invisible 
 partner, but the Kaiser's reports of him were 
 too definite, not to say familiar, for them to be 
 skeptical. 
 
 That William II's Gott should be a pagan of 
 the old Germanic type was inevitable. Two 
 generations of unparalleled devotion to sci- 
 entific research and metaphysics had left 
 Germany pagan and materialist. The stirring 
 
6o GERMANY vs. CIVILIZATION 
 
 of atavistic instincts in her, through the re- 
 discovery by the historians of medieval Ger- 
 many and their magnification of the glories of 
 medieval Hohenstaufen, Saxon, and Suabian 
 monarchs, turned German attention back still 
 further, to the time before Christianity had 
 replaced their pagan religion. 
 
 In a passage of singularly imaginative in- 
 sight, the late J. A. Cramb surveyed swiftly 
 the fourteen centuries during which the Ger- 
 mans called themselves Christians. There 
 was, he says, no real Christian spirit in their 
 hearts. Their religion was the religion of valor, 
 of war, of killing and being killed, of making 
 physical courage the final test of life, and its 
 attainment the only aim worthy of men. But 
 Christ preached a different religion — the 
 religion of righteousness, of brotherhood, of 
 self-sacrifice, and of mercy. The war to which 
 he called his followers was of the spirit, and 
 spiritual was the test which he applied to con- 
 duct; not to kill, but to heal; not to hate, but 
 to love; not to oppress, or cheat, or persecute 
 
KAISER AND GOTT 61 
 
 others, but to do unto them as you would be 
 done by — those were the ideals which Christ 
 opposed to the religion of Odin, the War-God. 
 Cramb puts into the mouth of latter-day 
 Germany this summary: — 
 
 Judaea and Galilee cast their dreary spell over 
 Greece and Rome, when Greece and Rome were 
 already sinking into decrepitude and the crea- 
 tive power in them was exhausted, when weari- 
 ness and bitterness wakened with their greatest 
 spirits at day and sank to sleep again with them 
 at night. But Jud^a and Galilee struck Ger- 
 many in the splendor and heroism of her prime. 
 Germany and the whole Teutonic people in the 
 fifth century made the great error. They con- 
 quered Rome, but, dazzled by Rome's authority, 
 they adopted the religion and the culture of the 
 vanquished. Germany's own deep religious in- 
 stinct, her native genius for religion, manifested 
 in her creative success, was arrested, stunted, 
 thwarted. But having once adopted the new 
 faith, she strove to live that faith, and for more 
 than thirty generations she has struggled and 
 wrestled to see with eyes that were not her eyes, 
 to worship a God that was not her God, to live 
 with a world-vision that was not her vision, and 
 to strive for a heaven that was not her heaven. 
 
62 GERMANY vs. CIVILIZATION 
 
 But struggle as she might, Germany found 
 Christianity an alien religion. By the Refor- 
 mation she freed herself from it in its most 
 rigid theological discipline: and then she 
 chafed at Protestantism. Her philosophers, 
 from Kant to Nietzsche, pulled down one 
 after another the pillars on which rested what 
 remained of Christianity. Nietzsche freed 
 Germany from the last trammels of Christian 
 tradition. 
 
 Nietzsche clears away the "accumulated 
 rubbish" of twelve hundred years [says Cramb, 
 speaking for Germany]. He attempts to set the 
 German imagination back where it was with 
 Alaric and Theodoric, fortified by the experi- 
 ence of twelve centuries to confront the darkness 
 unaided, unappalled, triumphant, great and 
 free. . . . And what is the religion, which, on the 
 whole, may be characterized as the religion of 
 the most earnest and passionate minds of young 
 Germany? 
 
 In the newer Imperative ring the accents of an 
 earlier, greater prime, the accents heard by the 
 Scamander, which even at Chaeronea did not en- 
 tirely die away: — 
 
KAISER AND GOTT 63 
 
 Ye have heard how in old times It was said, 
 Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the 
 earth; but I say unto you, Blessed are the val- 
 iant, for they shall make the earth their throne. 
 And ye have heard men say. Blessed are the poor 
 in spirit; but I say unto you, Blessed are the 
 great in soul and the free in spirit, for they shall 
 enter into Valhalla. And ye have heard men say, 
 Blessed are the peacemakers; but I say unto you, 
 Blessed are the war-makers, for they shall be 
 called, if not the children of Jahve, the children 
 of Odin, who is greater than Jahve.^ 
 
 Such is the religion, described in flinty 
 phrases by one who more than half believed in 
 it, which Germany has been waiting for fifteen 
 centuries to force upon the world at the point 
 of her sword.^ The deity who presides over this 
 
 ^ J. A. Cramb: Germany and England (London: John 
 Murray, 1914), pp. 113, 114, 116, 117. 
 
 2 The suspicion that the Germans would relapse to 
 their primitive barbaric ideals, has haunted more than one 
 of their writers. Heine expressed this in a memorable pas- 
 sage, from which these sentences are taken: "Christianity 
 — and this is its most beautiful service — has subdued to 
 some extent that German brutal desire for combat, and if 
 the restraining Talisman, the Cross, falls to pieces, then 
 the ferocity of the old fighters will break out, the senseless 
 
64 GERMANY vs, CIVILIZATION 
 
 religion is the Gott with whom William II is in 
 partnership. 
 
 BerserkeB rage, about which the Northern poets say and 
 sing so much. That Talisman is rotten, and the day will 
 come when it will crumble away. Then the old stone gods 
 will rise out of the desolate ruins and rub the dust of a 
 thousand years from their e^s, and Thor will spring up 
 with his giant hammer and dash to pieces the old Gothic 
 cathedrals." Heine: Sdmmtliche Werke, vol. in, p. lo8, 
 "Religion und Philosophic in Deutschland." (1834.) 
 
CHAPTER VI 
 
 WILLIAM THE PEACEMAKER ' 
 
 A certain prince of the present time, whom it is well not 
 to name, never does anything but preach peace and good 
 faith, but he is really a great enemy to both. 
 
 Machiavelli, The Prince^ xviii. ' 
 
 WILLIAM II became Emperor in 1888. 
 He had nourished himself on the doc- 
 trines and example of Frederick the Great. 
 The claim to reign by Divine Right, which 
 the elder and the younger despot boasted, is 
 a growth of comparatively recent centuries 
 among European sovereigns, not without 
 humor. Stripped of its bombastic rhetoric, it 
 amounts simply to this : when a monarch had 
 successfully established his power, by usurpa- 
 tion, by robbery, or by slaughter, he declared 
 that he was God's anointed. William both liked 
 the idea and knew its potency, even among 
 a race which was fast losing its sense for the 
 Divine in everything. The Romans, after the 
 
66 GERMANY vs. CIVILIZATION 
 
 time of Augustus, sank into such moral deca- 
 dence that they went further: they no longer 
 traced the lineage of their Emperors to a 
 divine ancestor, but treated them as gods in 
 the flesh. William's inborn egomania was so 
 pronounced that he might have found no 
 difficulty in believing himself a deity; but 
 while he always spoke in his own person as 
 Emperor by Divine Right, he usually rein- 
 forced his commands by clinching references 
 to Gott. 
 
 During the earlier years of his reign, his 
 medievalism, his continual harangues on his 
 own will and perfection, his louder and louder 
 exaltation of the Army, his sudden outbursts 
 of passion, or his diplomatic indiscretions, and 
 the growing frequency with which he indulged 
 in the disquieting amusement of rattling his 
 scabbard, annoyed and even disgusted a good 
 many Germans, especially those who lived 
 outside of Prussia. One bold critic published 
 a pamphlet on Caligula, in which he drew 
 the portrait of the mad Roman Emperor so 
 
WILLIAM THE PEACEMAKER 67 
 
 vividly that myriads of Germans saw in it 
 the likeness of the divinely anointed, neurotic 
 Hohenzollern. The censors, however, soon 
 discouraged criticism by clapping into prison 
 satirists, editors, critics, and other doubters of 
 Imperial Almightiness. Even the most inno- 
 cent could involuntarily commit the crime of 
 lese-majeste: for the zealous Prussian officers 
 sniffed treason in trifles. The world laughed 
 irreverently to see the Germans laced in such 
 a strait-jacket and expected that they would 
 tire of William's despotic freaks; but he, and 
 also the Ring, which artfully poured into his 
 mind the suggestions of policies which he 
 supposed he originated, knew the Germans 
 best, and never doubted that they would 
 wear submissively the heaviest yoke, how- 
 ever restive they might be under a light 
 one. 
 
 Foreign observers, distrustful of William 
 from the beginning, were not less repelled by 
 his hypocritical praises of peace than by his 
 sanctimonious patronizing of Gott. Read over 
 
68 GERMANY vs, CIVILIZATION 
 
 his addresses and detect in them now, if you 
 could not when he uttered them, their hollow 
 note: — 
 
 The object of the Army is to secure peace for 
 us, or if peace is broken, to be in a position to 
 fight for it with honor. 
 
 I am determined to keep peace with every one, 
 so far as it lies in my power. 
 
 The mighty German Army is the mainstay of 
 the peace of Europe. 
 
 Though the German Navy is specially in- 
 tended for the safeguarding and preservation of 
 peace, it will, I am confident, do its duty if called 
 into action. 
 
 Secure is that peace which stands behind the 
 shield and under the sword of the German 
 Michael. 
 
 I lend my hand to any cause which can help to 
 further the great cause of peace. 
 
 I look upon the peace of the German people as 
 sacred; but it is our duty to recognize from the 
 signs of the times that we must prepare to defend 
 ourselves from aggression. 
 
 The peace of Europe is not In danger: it rests 
 on foundations which are too solid and firm to 
 be easily shaken by the lies and calumnies of 
 mischief-makers. 
 
WILLIAM THE PEACEMAKER 69 
 
 While the voluble William continued to 
 vociferate "Peace, Peace!" he plotted "War, 
 War!" in his heart. . He went on unceasingly 
 to swell his Army, to strengthen its equip- 
 ment, and above all to encourage those who 
 were diffusing the militarist poison in every 
 German mind. As if it were not enough for 
 Germans to be taught that they must be ready 
 against the time when they should go forth to 
 new victories on land, William breathed into 
 them the dream that they ought also to dom- 
 inate the sea. "Our future lies upon the wa- 
 ter," he announced, at the opening of the new 
 port of Stettin in 1890; words listened to with 
 only a passing wonder, but which prove how 
 early in his career the Kaiser was coquet- 
 ting with the temptation of world-dominion. 
 Thereupon the keels of the first German war- 
 ships were laid down; the German Navy 
 League was organized to arouse the enthusi- 
 asm of the Empire ; the glory of embarking on 
 vast colonial enterprises was preached; and 
 the ulterior purpose which a mighty Navy 
 
70 GERMANY vs. CIVILIZATION 
 
 might serve began to be whispered. By the 
 year 1900 the toast, "The Day," was not only 
 drunk by Army and Navy officers at their 
 mess, but was proposed and cheered at public 
 banquets. 
 
 What "Day".? The day on which the Ger- 
 mans should meet and destroy the English 
 Navy, conquer England, shatter the British 
 Empire, and inherit its wealth. That was the 
 aim every German was taught to strive for; 
 and, since we hate those whom we have in- 
 jured or plot to injure, the German Mendac- 
 ity Bureau circulated throughout Germany 
 the belief that England, jealous of Germany's 
 commercial success, intended to attack the 
 Fatherland. So the business of teaching ha- 
 tred of England was deliberately carried on, 
 the black seeds being sown in the minds of 
 little children and watered and nurtured with 
 Teutonic persistence. 
 
 But actions speak louder than words, and 
 during all those years when, under the pre- 
 tense that England was going to attack Ger- 
 
WILLIAM THE PEACEMAKER 71 
 
 many, Germany prepared to attack England, 
 there was no port in the British Empire into 
 which German merchant ships did not sail 
 unhindered, no British dock on which German 
 merchandise was not unloaded without dis- 
 criminating duties. The Germans boasted, 
 and with reason, of their industrial expansion, 
 unmatched either in rapidity or in volume; 
 they boasted that their goods undersold Brit- 
 ish goods in London itself; they boasted that 
 they were taking away trade from England in 
 China, in the Far East and in other British 
 dependencies, as well as in other lands, to all 
 of which they gained access through British 
 ports. These boasts were founded on facts. 
 And yet the Germans declared almost in the 
 same breath that British "NavaKsm" — a 
 word they coined to dupe the unthinking — 
 prevented German industry from reaching a 
 market and German commerce from having 
 its share of the world's trade. In the long Hst 
 of German lies few surpasses this in shame- 
 lessness. It would seem that to lie successfully 
 
72 GERMANY vs. CIVILIZATION 
 
 one must be civilized. The German exercises 
 in this art have the unconscious naivete of the 
 semi-savage, who fails to perceive either that 
 he contradicts himself, or that his deceit is 
 patent to his intended victim. 
 
 The favorite German practice of accusing 
 the enemy of intending to do what the Ger- 
 mans themselves were on the point of doing, is 
 another example of this semi-savage naivete. 
 In war they call it an "offensive defensive," 
 and, since war is at best a relic of barbarism, 
 the trick has its strategic justification; but in 
 diplomacy or in politics its barbaric origin 
 betrays it when it is tried on peoples whose 
 standards are not semi-savage. The Kaiser 
 and his Militarist Ring, however, used it with 
 profit among the Germans themselves. When 
 they wished to increase the Army, they 
 needed only to whisper that Russia was 
 threatening the Fatherland, or that France, 
 stung by some German insult into uttering a 
 fiery word, was growing dangerous and must 
 be guarded against. 
 
WILLIAM THE PEACEMAKER 73 
 
 Having launched his naval policy, the Kaiser 
 found England a convenient bogy for justi- 
 fying the immense appropriations which his 
 plans of naval expansion required. And while 
 he added cruiser to cruiser and dreadnought to 
 dreadnought, and reached at last the glory of 
 the superdreadnought, he continued in his ad- 
 dresses to assure the world that the mission 
 of the German Navy was peace. No doubt a 
 great majority of the German people believed 
 his assurances; no doubt, also, they believed 
 that France and Russia and now England, 
 either singly or together, were evolving the 
 designs which the Imperial Ring insinuated 
 against them. The German people have been 
 trained too long to take their information 
 from above, to question its veracity. 
 
 To Prussianize Germany; to keep the Ger- 
 man military and naval equipment up to the 
 highest pitch of excellence; to imbue the Ger- 
 man people, whose obedience was proved past 
 wavering, with such a sense of their supremacy 
 that they would accept as a matter of course 
 
74 GERMANY vs. CIVILIZATION 
 
 the gospel that they were to rule the world; 
 and to proclaim himself the defender of peace, 
 in order the more easily to mask his warlike 
 projects — this was the work of William II, 
 aided by his Militarist Ring, during more than 
 twenty years of his reign. In these labors, 
 patience stands out as the conspicuous trait. 
 Hard must it have been for the innate auto- 
 crat, who, at twenty-five, imagined himself as 
 being potentially a greater soldier than Na- 
 poleon — no less ! — to wait one decade and 
 then two, and well on into the third, for the 
 opportunity to display his military genius. 
 Many times he seemed to be on the point of 
 breaking loose, but somebody always checked 
 him at the last moment. Nevertheless, he al- 
 lowed himself a certain luxury of pugnacious 
 by-play, as if to hint to his Militarist entour- 
 age that he was not really a peace-loving milk- 
 sop, and to warn foreigners that the scabbard 
 he rattled held a sword, which he was aching 
 to use. 
 In sending his telegram to the Boer Presi- 
 
WILLIAM THE PEACEMAKER 75 
 
 dent Kruger in 1896, he gratified his desire to 
 insuh England. By seizing Kiao-Chau and as- 
 suming the protectorate over the province of 
 Shan-tung, he gave notice that Germany would 
 not lag behind the other European Powers in 
 land-grabbing. When the United States made 
 war on Spain, he did his utmost to form a 
 European coalition to protect Spain and to 
 punish the Yankees, whose Monroe Doctrine 
 thwarted his schemes in the Western Hemi- 
 sphere. He openly grieved that he had not a 
 large fleet, so that he might then and there 
 "take the United States by the scruff of the 
 neck." Deprived of that satisfaction, he sent 
 his preposterous Admiral Diederichs to Ma- 
 nila on the chance of clutching what he could 
 in the disintegration of the Philippines. Died- 
 erichs glowered upon the American Com- 
 modore Dewey in that enraged mastiff way 
 which seems to be taught to Prussian officers 
 as part of their drill; but Dewey was a simple 
 Vermonter, who had never been instructed 
 that he ought to quail at the Prussian glower. 
 
76 GERMANY vs. CIVILIZATION 
 
 and he quietly caused Diederichs to under- 
 stand that, ahhough his own ships were infe- 
 rior in number and metal, he would attack the 
 German squadron if it attempted to interfere. 
 Diederichs understood.^ 
 
 From that time forward, the Kaiser pur- 
 sued a double policy towards the United 
 States: in public, professing effusive friend- 
 ship; in secret, chafing against the Monroe 
 Doctrine which barred his projected German 
 colonization in South America and checked his 
 attempts by devious ways to secure a foothold 
 from which the United States would find it 
 hard to dislodge him. And then he abetted the 
 scheme for organizing the German-Americans 
 into a body which, at the favorable moment, 
 should openly declare itself German and not 
 American, defy the United States Government, 
 and work to control this country in the Kaiser's 
 interest. This conspiracy spread slowly, noise- 
 lessly, unobserved by its proposed victims, as 
 
 ^ It ought never to be forgotten that the British com- 
 mander, Chichester, offered to stand by Dewey if there 
 were need. 
 
WILLIAM THE PEACEMAKER 77 
 
 if it were a cancer which the Germans had the 
 maleficent art to plant and nourish. 
 
 But while the Kaiser's hirelings sprinkled 
 his poison secretly, he took delight in spectacu- 
 lar performances by which to startle the world. 
 He sent a "punitive expedition" to China, and 
 bade it treat the natives so frightfully that no 
 Chinese would dare look a German in the face 
 for a thousand years. Waldersee, who com- 
 manded the expedition, saw to it that the Im- 
 perial order "to be as Huns" was accurately 
 carried out. Like the other European Powers, 
 Germany expected to snatch a huge slice of 
 China, but was deterred by the adroit diplo- 
 macy of John Hay, the American Secretary of 
 State. The Kaiser's attack on Venezuela in 
 1902, intended nominally for the collection 
 of debts due to Germans, but really to test 
 whether the American Government would 
 defend the Monroe Doctrine by something 
 stronger than words, might have succeeded if 
 a mere word-weaver had been President at 
 Washington; but Theodore Roosevelt, also 
 
78 GERMANY vs, CIVILIZATION 
 
 unterrified by the Prussian glower, insisted 
 that the Kaiser must agree within forty-eight 
 hours to submit the Venezuelan dispute to 
 arbitration; and the Kaiser agreed. 
 
 It was in Europe, however, that William 
 displayed his purposes most ominously. He 
 detached Turkey from her long-standing bond 
 with England. He extended Teutonic in- 
 trigues in the Balkans. Taking advantage of 
 Russia's entanglement in the war with Japan, 
 he bullied France and might have attacked her 
 if he had not distrusted England's attitude. 
 Still, he could plume himself on having hum- 
 bled France and ousted her Foreign Minister, 
 Delcasse, by merely rattling his scabbard. 
 From that time on, although his truculence 
 was less and less guarded, he did not desist 
 from proclaiming that he held the maintenance 
 of peace to be Germany's mission. In 191 1 his 
 patience seemed exhausted ; for again he made 
 French intrigues in Morocco a pretext for a 
 bellicose demonstration, and he was on the 
 point of invading France in order to achieve 
 
WILLIAM THE PEACEMAKER 79 
 
 the long-threatened operation of "bleeding 
 her white," when he discovered that England 
 and Russia would support France and that his 
 finances were less prepared than his Army. So 
 again he drew back on the very brink of hos- 
 tilities. Next year he demanded of every Ger- 
 man a five per cent contribution — a " patri- 
 otic sacrifice " — for the benefit of the Army. 
 These specimen acts, told in sequence, and 
 filled out, as they might be, by many symp- 
 tomatic details, with the addition of other evi- 
 dence not even referred to here, lay bare the 
 speciousness of the Kaiser's claim to be reck- 
 oned among the peacemakers. He aspired to 
 inherit the earth, but he was too good a Prus- 
 sian to suppose he could come into that inher- 
 itance by peace instead of by war. And when 
 put to the direct test of reducing the number of 
 dreadnoughts to be built according to his naval 
 program, or cutting down his Army, or enter- 
 ing into a conference on general disarmament, 
 he flatly refused, and his mouthpieces in the 
 press ridiculed these suggestions as childish. 
 
CHAPTER VII 
 
 KULTUR 
 
 When 't is God's will to bring an utter doom 
 Upon a house, He first in mortal men 
 Implants what works it out. 
 
 ^SCHYLUS. Fragment 151. 
 
 DURING Germany's long political and 
 military preparation for world-suprem- 
 acy, a propaganda for putting the minds and 
 consciences of the German people into har- 
 mony with the Kaiser's ambition went on not 
 less effectively, although it appeared to be less 
 systematically organized. 
 
 Insatiate ambition, like jealousy, is a pas- 
 sion which gets confirmation and fresh fuel 
 wherever it looks. In all directions the Ger- 
 mans saw proofs that they were the Chosen 
 People. They interpreted the doctrine of evo- 
 lution so as to draw from it a warrant for their 
 aspirations. Evolution taught that "the fit- 
 test survived." Never was a word more decep- 
 
KULTUR 81 
 
 tive than that word "fittest." When we apply 
 it to human concerns, which is fittest? Man 
 and the fly are widely diffused over the earth ; 
 does that imply parity between them ? A thug 
 can murder the wisest philosopher or noblest 
 statesman ; the thug survives ; does that mean 
 that he is "fitter" than his victim? The Ger- 
 mans believed that the first element in fitness 
 to survive is superior brute force. By that, 
 their ancestors had conquered decaying Rome ; 
 by that, the Manchus made themselves mas- 
 ters of China; by that, the Spaniards over- 
 threw the more highly civilized Saracens. To 
 assemble the greatest possible volume of 
 brute force, in their Army, Navy, fortifica- 
 tions, and equipment, was therefore their 
 task. 
 
 A people which persuades itself that it is 
 not only superior but fittest, acquires inevi- 
 tably a supercilious attitude towards the rest 
 of mankind ; and during the last quarter of the 
 nineteenth century, when the Germans were 
 being infected by this idea, the other Great 
 
82 GERMANY vs. CIVILIZATION 
 
 Powers of Europe, and the United States also, 
 accepted the doctrine that fate intended the 
 Inferior Races to be the chattels of the Su- 
 perior Races. To seize the lands of the black, 
 brown, or yellow men who could not defend 
 themselves, to exploit the natural resources 
 of their lands, and to treat the black, brown, 
 or yellow men as part of those resources, or 
 even as a species of the fauna to be hunted 
 and exterminated at will, was the cheerful, 
 orthodox creed of the Superior Races. Mate- 
 rial progress, which consisted in accumulating 
 wealth at a speed hitherto unprecedented, 
 was the standard which governed the Su- 
 perior Races. 
 
 There is a venerable book which declares 
 that God created man in his own image : this 
 Book makes no mention of the color of God's 
 creatures. But in our time white men have 
 assumed that they alone are made in God's 
 image and complexion, and that while they 
 may be endowed with a soul, yellow and black 
 and brown men are as soulless as the beasts 
 
KULTUR 83 
 
 of the field. The denial of human solidarity 
 opens the door to hideous abuses. 
 
 The Germans laid to heart this fatalistic 
 gospel of Superior and Inferior. With proper 
 logic they argued that, since color was only 
 an accident, the Superior Race had no more 
 obligations towards an Inferior Race which 
 happened to be white than towards a black 
 or a yellow; and the evidences which satis- 
 fied them of their superiority, convinced them 
 also of the inferiority of their white neighbors ! 
 By the German gauge, the Latins — Spanish, 
 French, and Italians — were manifestly de- 
 cadent. The Slavs, led by Russia, had never 
 risen to civilization, but threatened to inun- 
 date Central and Western Europe. England, 
 they had to admit, had been both a strong and 
 a valiant nation; but she was weary now, 
 with the weariness of old age, which deterred 
 her from keeping up with modern methods, 
 and she had become so enervated by wealth 
 that she trusted in the gold of the sovereign, 
 rather than in the steel of the sword. To 
 
84 GERMANY vs. CIVILIZATION 
 
 German eyes the United States appeared as a 
 collection of eighty or ninety million human 
 beings, the off-scourings of a score of coun- 
 tries, undisciplined, lacking a unifying prin- 
 ciple, leaderless, corrupt, wayward, ominously 
 good-natured, easily duped, and accessible to 
 only one common motive — the desire of the 
 dollar. To Germany, sure that she had the 
 mission and the method, the task of subduing 
 her white rivals, whose internal decadence she 
 thought she had diagnosed, no longer appeared 
 insuperable. 
 
 Ever since the Germans had taken to eru- 
 dition, they had surpassed all their competi- 
 tors as doctrinaires. Their passion for thor- 
 oughness, and their obedience to the word 
 uttered from above, made them always seek 
 for some theory to guide their thinking and 
 their doing; indeed, they felt ill at ease until 
 they had put on the stiff harness of some mas- 
 ter theorist. 
 
 Their poets of the Golden Period sang some- 
 what vaguely of German unity and of free- 
 
KULTUR 85 
 
 dom: not Goethe, who cared nothing for 
 either, setting humanity above patriotism; 
 but Schiller, whose soul was consumed by 
 his desire for liberty under the form of inde- 
 pendence, and Arndt, and Korner, and other 
 patriotic voices. Then came the historians, 
 Giesebrecht, and Savigny, and the battalion 
 of other resuscitators of medieval Germany, 
 which they described with glowing detail and 
 with so much sympathy and admiration that 
 they caused their countrymen to turn for 
 example and for inspiration from the present 
 and look upon that past seen as in a rosy 
 mirage. It is a measure of the backwardness 
 of the Germans in political instinct, not less 
 than of that atavistic tendency of theirs to 
 which I have referred, that they could not 
 find a congenial resting-place in the politico- 
 social conditions of the nineteenth century, 
 but were at home only when they had re- 
 verted to the Feudalism of the eleventh. To 
 their satisfaction in the rediscovery of Med- 
 ievalism presently was added the German 
 
86 GERMANY vs. CIVILIZATION 
 
 Imperial idea, another product of the glam- 
 orous Middle Age; then the spokesmen of 
 Prussia, as the foreordained Imperial leader, 
 arose; and finally, Prussia having created 
 the German Empire, the subsidized historians. 
 Von Sybel and the rest, sang their chorus of 
 paeans to the House of Hohenzollern, and to 
 the glories of Prussia, without which the 
 German Empire — the dream of the medieval 
 Teutons — could never have come to pass. 
 
 Art also conspired to glorify, not only Ger- 
 man medievalism but Germanic mythology. 
 Music, the only art which has flourished in 
 Germany since Heine died, embodied through 
 Wagner the medieval conceptions of Tann- 
 hauser and Parsifal, and the semi-barbaric 
 myths of the Nibelungen Epic — those myths 
 in which fighting is the only honorable occu- 
 pation for heroes on earth, and Valhalla the 
 only heaven in which they hope to dwell. 
 The mighty sweep of Wagner's compositions 
 caused most of his hearers to forget that his 
 themes reflected the unrestrained passions of 
 
KULTUR 87 
 
 war, lust, and cunning that belong to an 
 uncivilized race. German erudites, to whom 
 everything German is superior to anything 
 foreign, assured their countrymen that "The 
 Ring of the Nibelungs" need not fear com- 
 parison with the "lUad" and the "Odyssey"; 
 but the millions who cared nothing for purely 
 literary discussions drank in the music like 
 wine, and through the intoxication it pro- 
 duced in them, they saw War and Valor, the 
 primitive ideals of their race, endued with 
 supernal magic. So Wagner's music hastened 
 the paganizing of the Germans, putting into 
 every German heart the pagan concepts out 
 of which he framed his Trilogy. At the same 
 time, although Wagner detested Prussia and 
 the Prussians, he helped on the Prussianiza- 
 tion of Germany, by reviving the atavistic 
 worship of Valor and War. Being wrought 
 subtly, these effects were all the more far- 
 reaching, penetrating even those musical 
 partisans who fought stubbornly against 
 Wagner's music. He might have paraphrased 
 
88 GERMANY vs. CIVILIZATION 
 
 the wise remark of Fletcher of Sahoun: "I 
 care not who \\ rites the laws of a nation, if 
 I may write its operas." 
 
 In all this, the Germans were led, under 
 the astute guidance of Prussia, back to those 
 "old-German gloomy times" and ideals of "a 
 barbaric past," which Goethe warned them 
 against, instead of to the cheering and en- 
 lightening "eras in art and literature when 
 remarkable men obtained perfect culture." 
 No wonder that during the War the Prussian 
 censors have put Goethe under the ban. 
 
 Still more was the Germanic megalomania 
 stimulated by direct propaganda. Its high 
 priests fished out of the waters of Lethe an 
 " Essay on the Inequality of Human Races," 
 written nearly forty years before by Count 
 Arthur Gobineau, a French aristocrat, who 
 thought that he had discovered the law which 
 explains why some races dominate and others 
 serve. "Understand the law, obey it and 
 rule, and be saved by it from the decadence 
 which has overtaken one dominant race after 
 
KULTUR 89 
 
 another" — that is the burden of Gobineau's 
 message, which the Germans took to be ad- 
 dressed to themselves. What stronger back- 
 ing could they desire than these deductions 
 of the French prophet, who prophesied that 
 the Gallic people would go down before the 
 Teutonic? Gobineau Clubs sprang up, and 
 Gobinismus poured its stream into the rising 
 flood of Pan-Germanism. 
 
 But the Germans had a prophet of their 
 own — Heinrich von Treitschke, nominally 
 an historian, actually, the ablest partisan in- 
 terpreter of history that Germany had seen. 
 Like Carlyle, a volcano of ethical and political 
 convictions, a fanatic, if you will, Treitschke, 
 Slavic by descent, Saxon by birth, anti-Prus- 
 sian by education, having been lured to Ber- 
 lin, fell under the spell of the Prussianizing 
 ambitions, and during the last twenty years 
 of his life he taught thousands of receptive 
 Germans from his professorial chair, and mul- 
 titudes by his writings, that the German Em- 
 pire could, and therefore must, move forward 
 
90 GERMANY vs, CIVILIZATION 
 
 to fulfil its transcendent destiny. By expos- 
 ing particularly the weakness of England, 
 he helped to implant hatred of her as an 
 irreconcilable rival to Germany. He assailed 
 also Democracy, and as he spoke with vigor, 
 which often became vituperative, he com- 
 manded attention ; and as his message was not 
 less pleasing than Gobineau's to Teutonic 
 ears, his words supplied texts for Pan-Ger- 
 manist promoters. His pupils became dis- 
 ciples, who carried his teaching to millions 
 who were entirely prepared to welcome it. 
 Treitschke, absolutely deaf, arrogant, inso- 
 lent, stupendously self-centred and self-satis- 
 fied, closed his mental ears to adverse criti- 
 cism ; and well typifies the state of mind which 
 has prevailed in Germany under the fostering 
 methods of William II. 
 
 Philosophy also — if we admit that phil- 
 osophy is not the love of wisdom — encour- 
 aged German megalomania. Nietzsche, an- 
 other prophet of Slavic derivation, proclaimed 
 a creed which, if accepted literally, would 
 
KULTUR 91 
 
 confirm the saying of the witty Frenchwoman 
 that "the Earth is the madhouse of the uni- 
 verse." Indeed, long before Nietzsche was 
 born, insane asylums in all countries swarmed 
 with egomaniacs who had attempted to put 
 Nietzschean principles in practice. Nietzsche 
 held that the human race produces a few 
 Supermen, the law of whose being is to make 
 themselves stronger and stronger at the ex- 
 pense of the rest of mankind. Morals do not 
 exist for the Superman, because morals are 
 the disguised subterfuges of the weak to pro- 
 tect themselves from the strong. Finding 
 themselves crushed by the might of the strong, 
 the weak invented a system of good and evil, 
 a moral code of right and wrong, according 
 to which every one should be judged equally 
 and the strong should be punished without 
 fear or exception. The Superman must harden 
 himself against the feeling of brotherhood, of 
 compassion, of mercy, of charity. He must 
 live "beyond good and evil"; he must accept 
 no laws but the caprices of his own will, the 
 
92 GERMANY vs. CIVILIZATION 
 
 appetites and desires of his carnal nature, the 
 ambitions of what, were he a man, would be 
 called his soul. Nietzsche raged chiefly against 
 Christianity, which had constructed the reli- 
 gion under which slaves enjoyed rights and 
 Supermen were reminded of their bondage to 
 the moral law. The influence of Christianity 
 was further abominable because it enabled 
 the weak, the craven, the whimpering, to rise 
 to positions where they did not belong, and 
 kept alive masses who ought to be let die. 
 Since Supermen alone were to be considered, 
 whatever laid a featherweight of restraint 
 upon them was condemned. 
 
 In his own tragic pilgrimage to the mad- 
 house, Nietzsche flung out many other dog- 
 mas, often contradictory, but usually tainted 
 with egocentric extravagance. Like Wagner, 
 he loathed the Prussians, but that did not 
 prevent them from seizing upon his philosophy 
 of the Superman and applying it to them- 
 selves. Having once adopted it, they used 
 it as the keystone of their Pan-Germanist 
 
KULTUR 93 
 
 designs/ Their racial self-conceit did not re- 
 quire to be persuaded that they were the 
 Supermen outlined by Nietzsche ; and whether 
 the Kaiser ever read Nietzsche or not, he 
 comported himself from the beginning of his 
 reign as only one who recognized that he was 
 a sublime Superman could. 
 
 A final argument came from the Militar- 
 ists themselves. Early in the nineteenth cen- 
 tury Clausewitz wrote the first scientific 
 epistles on the worship of Moloch. His phil- 
 osophy of War taught that War is necessary 
 and normal, and that Peace, unless it be de- 
 voted to preparing for War, is a disease which 
 cunningly saps the honor, strength, and even 
 the life of a nation. No doubt the priests 
 of Judah found reasons for persuading their 
 countrymen to propitiate Moloch by the 
 sacrifice of children, reasons which would seem 
 crude to Germans filled with Hegelian intri- 
 cacies, but not less abhorrent to the moral 
 sense than are those of the latest Prussian 
 rhapsodists of War. In this business, ancient 
 
94 GERMANY vs, CIVILIZATION 
 
 and modern lose their meaning, for War 
 makes all generations contemporary, and 
 Clausewitz's doctrines, which are dignified 
 by being called "philosophy," he might have 
 heard from Attila, and Attila might have 
 learned them from any wolf that possessed 
 the faculty of human speech. 
 
 It remained for General Fried rich von Bem- 
 hardi to describe baldly what Germany had 
 accomplished, what she stood for, and how 
 she could fulfil her mission. He wrote three 
 years before the Kaiser forced war upon the 
 world in 1914. Bernhardi was so brutally 
 frank that German apologists have tried to 
 disavow him, asserting that he was a person 
 of no consequence, an army officer in re- 
 tirement, who amused himself with his mili- 
 tary vagaries, and they added that nobody 
 in Germany had read his book. Sheer false- 
 hoods. His book ran through many editions 
 before the war broke out; his own reputa- 
 tion as soldier and as military expert had long 
 been established; every one recognized that 
 
KULTUR 95 
 
 he simply discussed matters which were the 
 commonplaces of the General Staff and of the 
 poHtical Chancellery. And if he had never 
 written, scores upon scores of other Germans 
 had been pouring out for more than a decade 
 articles, monographs, books, all fraught with 
 the same message. Bernhardi wrote most 
 clearly — that was the secret of his sudden 
 and immense popularity. 
 
 His book, "Germany and the Next War,'* 
 bears the stamp of authenticity in the utter 
 unreserve with which it discusses projects 
 which either shame or discretion might have 
 counseled him not to divulge. In this respect 
 it resembles Machiavelli's "Prince" and 
 Frederick the Great's "Confessions.'* He 
 takes it for granted that his readers are at 
 one with him on his general proposition : that 
 they will no more dispute the declaration that 
 Germany must acquire world-dominion, and 
 that she must resort to war to gain her ends, 
 than a group of surgeons would wrangle over 
 the necessity of surgery. Bernhardi's sole 
 
96 GERMANY vs. CIVILIZATION 
 
 question was, when to perform the operation. 
 Having demonstrated a nation's right to 
 make war, he easily proves that it is a duty 
 to make it, and then he so traces Germany's 
 historical development as to arrive at the con- 
 clusion that the time is at hand for her to 
 risk everything in a gigantic struggle. World- 
 dominion or downfall — these are the alter- 
 natives which Germany must face. He has 
 nothing but contempt for a nation which, 
 having come within striking distance of world- 
 dominion, hesitates or turns back. 
 
 The last part of his book is practical, in 
 contrast to the doctrinal quality of the first 
 part. He takes up questions of armament, of 
 the navy, of the forces Germany can muster 
 and those of her enemies, of political condi- 
 tions at home, of diplomatic relations abroad, 
 of finance, and of so manipulating the German 
 people that they will regard the war, when it 
 comes, as inevitable, and as being forced upon 
 them by jealous and wicked rivals, and that 
 they will support it with patriotic zeal. He 
 
KULTUR 97 
 
 points to England as the chief adversary, but, 
 as if to dispel any unjustifiable respect Ger- 
 mans might still feel for England as a Great 
 Power, he describes her miHtary feebleness, 
 her internal unsoundness, the senile palsy 
 creeping through her body and shaking her 
 will. Only in her navy is she still preeminent; 
 but he thinks that Germany can equal her in 
 naval material and in training and surpass 
 her in cannon, and by torpedo boats work 
 great damage to her fleet. 
 
 Bernhardi's discussion of the best plan of 
 campaign is not less lucid than his examina- 
 tion of the various alliances which might be 
 formed and how to deal with each. But the 
 significance of his book lies in the fact that 
 it is the revelation of the purpose of the Ger- 
 man Imperial Despotism to rule the world, 
 and of the preparations made therefor. We 
 might call it "German Militarism in the Con- 
 fessional,'' except that confession suggests the 
 recognition of having sinned, whereas the 
 German Militarists, from the Kaiser down, 
 
98 GERMANY vs. CIVILIZATION 
 
 instead of compunction, felt only such impa- 
 tience as train-robbers may feel who, having 
 perfected every plan, count the moments for 
 the train to heave in sight. 
 
 Bernhardi quotes many laudations of war,^ 
 beginning with Heraclitus of Ephesus, who 
 said, "War is the father of all things." 
 
 Here are other mottoes: — 
 
 War is as necessary as the struggle of the ele- 
 ments in nature. (A. W. von Schlegel.) 
 
 Wars are terrible, but necessary, for they save 
 the State from social petrifaction and stagna- 
 tion. It is well that the transitoriness of the 
 goods of this world is not only preached but is 
 learned by experience. War alone teaches this 
 lesson. (Kuno Fischer.) 
 
 A thousand touching traits testify to the sa- 
 cred power of the love which a righteous war 
 awakes in noble nations. (Treltschke.) 
 
 War opens the most fruitful field to all vir- 
 tues, for at every moment constancy, pity, mag- 
 nanimity, heroism, and mercy shine forth in it. 
 (Frederick the Great.) 
 
 1 I quote from the English Popular Edition. F. von 
 Bernhardi: Germany and the Next War. London: Arnold. 
 1914. 
 
KULTUR 99 
 
 It has always been the weary, spiritless, and 
 exhausted ages which have played with the 
 dreams of perpetual peace. (Treitschke.) 
 
 As an unanswerable argument for any one 
 who may still be bound by the tradition that 
 Christianity enjoins love and peace, Bern- 
 hardi, with a deviltry at which Mephistophe- 
 les would chuckle, adds : — 
 
 Christ himself said: "I am not come to send 
 peace on earth but a sword." . . . Thus, ac- 
 cording to Christianity, we cannot disapprove 
 of war in itself, but must admit it is justified 
 morally and historically. 
 
 I add a few of Bernhardi's own dicta, 
 chosen almost at random: they express not 
 only his individual opinions, but those of the 
 Ring which has shaped the policy of modern 
 Germany. 
 
 Since almost every part of the globe is inhab- 
 ited, new territory must, as a rule, be obtained 
 at the cost of its possessors — that is to say, 
 by conquest, which thus becomes a law of ne- 
 cessity. . . . Over-populated countries pour a 
 stream of emigrants into other States and terri- 
 
100 GERMANY vs. CIVILIZATION 
 
 tories. These submit to the legislature of the 
 new country, but try to obtain favorable condi- 
 tions of existence for themselves at the cost of 
 the original inhabitants with whom they com- 
 pete. This amounts to conquest. 
 
 The conception of the constitutional State in 
 the strictest sense is an impossibility, and would 
 lead to an intolerable state of things. 
 
 There never have been, and never will be, 
 universal rights of men. 
 
 Even if a comprehensive international code 
 were drawn up, no self-respecting nation would 
 sacrifice its sense of right to it. 
 
 Arbitration treaties must be peculiarly detri- 
 mental to an aspiring people which has not yet 
 reached its political and national zenith, and is 
 bent on expanding its power in order to play its 
 part honorably in the civilized world. 
 
 We are facing a hidden, but none the less for- 
 midable crisis — perhaps the most momentous 
 crisis in the history of the German nation. We 
 have fought in the last great wars for our na- 
 tional union, and our position among the Powers 
 of Europe; we must now decide whether we wish 
 to develop into and maintain a World-Empire, 
 and procure for German spirit and German 
 ideas that fit recognition which has been hither- 
 to withheld from them. 
 
KULTUR 101 
 
 In one way or another, we must square our 
 account with France, if we wish for a free hand in 
 our international policy. This is the first and 
 foremost condition of a sound German policy, 
 and since the hostility of France once for all 
 cannot be removed by peaceful overtures, the 
 matter must be settled by force of arms. France 
 must be so completely crushed that she can 
 never again come across our path. 
 
 No people is so little qualified as the German 
 to direct its own destinies, whether in a par- 
 liamentarian or republican constitution; to no 
 people is the customary Liberal pattern so in- 
 appropriate as to us. 
 
 Our own country, by employing its military 
 powers, has attained a degree of Kultur which 
 it never could have by the methods of peaceful 
 development. 
 
 War is only a means of attaining ends and 
 of supporting moral strength. 
 
 The first and most essential duty of every 
 great civilized people is to prepare for war 
 on a scale commensurate with its political 
 need. 
 
 When public opinion does not stand under 
 control of a master will, or a compelling neces- 
 sity, it can be too easily led astray by the most 
 varied influences. This danger is particularly 
 
102 GERMANY vs. CIVILIZATION 
 
 great in a country so torn asunder, both inter- 
 nally and externally, as Germany. 
 
 Our western frontier, in itself strong, can be 
 easily turned on the north through Belgium and 
 Holland. No natural obstacle, no strong for- 
 tress, is there to oppose a hostile invasion, and 
 neutrahty is only a paper bulwark. 
 
 We shall therefore some day, perhaps, be 
 faced with the necessity of standing isolated in 
 a great war of the nations . . . and shall have to 
 trust to our own strength and our own reso- 
 lution for victory. Such a war — for us more 
 than for any other nation — must be a war for 
 our political and national existence. This must 
 be so, for our opponents can only attain their 
 political aims by almost annihilating us by land 
 and by sea. If the victory is only half won, they 
 would have to expect continuous renewals of 
 the contest, which would be contrary to their 
 interests. They know that well enough, and 
 therefore avoid the contest, since we shall cer- 
 tainly defend ourselves with the utmost bit- 
 terness and obstinacy. If, notwithstanding, 
 circumstances make the war inevitable, then 
 the intention of our enemies to crush us to the 
 ground, and our own resolve to maintain our 
 position victoriously, will make it a war of 
 desperation. A war fought and lost under such 
 
KULTUR 103 
 
 circumstances would destroy our laboriously 
 gained political importance, would jeopardize 
 the whole future of our nation, would throw 
 us back for centuries, would shake the influence 
 of German thought in the civilized world, and 
 thus check the general progress of mankind in 
 its healthy development, for which a flourishing 
 Germany is the essential condition. Our next 
 war will be fought for the highest interests of 
 our country and of mankind. This will in- 
 vest it with importance in the world's history. 
 "World power or downfall!" will be our rally- 
 ing cry. 
 
 We Germans have a far greater and more ur- 
 gent duty towards civilization to perform than 
 the Great Asiatic Power [Japan]. We, like the 
 Japanese, can only fulfil it by the sword. 
 
 There can only be a short respite before we 
 once more face the question whether we will 
 draw the sword for our position in the world or 
 renounce such position once and for all. We 
 must not in any case wait until our opponents 
 have completed their arming and decide that 
 the hour of attack has come. 
 
 Bemhardi wrote this last warning in Octo- 
 ber, 191 3, and in July, 1914, the Kaiser and 
 his Ring decided that Germany's opponents 
 
104 GERMANY vs. CIVILIZATION 
 
 were in such unfavorable conditions that her 
 hour of destiny had struck. Then ensued the 
 Atrocious War, which had been prepared for 
 with more persistence, more thoroughness, 
 more ingenuity, and over a longer time, than 
 any other in modern history. 
 
 This war sprang as naturally from the Ger- 
 man heart and will as a vulture springs from 
 its nest. Prussian egomania, which had suc- 
 ceeded in identifying German national inter- 
 ests with its own; the example of Frederick 
 and Moltke and Bismarck; the impassioned 
 gospel of Treitschke ; the comforting reminder 
 of Nietzsche that to be a Superman, you 
 must act like a Superman ; the demonstration 
 of Bernhardi that Germany must not longer 
 postpone her battle for World-Dominion; 
 and the HohenzoUern dynastic ambition, cir- 
 culating through every artery and vein of the 
 Empire. — were elements, symptoms, omens, 
 that can neither be denied nor explained away. 
 Of course, we must remember that Kant, 
 Fichte, and Hegel — especially Hegel, with 
 
KULTUR 105 
 
 his ideal of the State — had preceded; but 
 it is the men who translate theory into action 
 whom we hold responsible. The mind of the 
 disciple, like an imperfect lens, distorts the 
 teaching of the master. 
 
CHAPTER VIII 
 
 PRUSSIANIZING GERMANY 
 
 Look to the essence of a thing, whether it be a point of 
 doctrine, of practice, or of interpretation. 
 
 Marcus Aurelius, viii, 22. 
 
 CIVILIZED peoples have invariably cher- 
 ished an ideal, which they call Culture 
 — it might be of the intellect; it might be 
 of the soul. 
 
 The culture which affects the soul is two- 
 fold, according as it lays greater stress on 
 Goodness or on Beauty. "To make reason 
 and the will of God prevail,'' as Bishop Wil- 
 son expressed it, is the end of ethical culture ; 
 and life thus conceived becomes, in Arnold's 
 phrase, a "study of perfection." The defini- 
 tion of Culture which springs from Beauty, 
 or has Beauty for its special quest and desire, 
 evades a formula. Like Marlowe, we still ask : 
 "What is beauty?" But we recognize Taste 
 as the product of this culture. In actual life, 
 
PRUSSIANIZING GERMANY 107 
 
 however, we seldom disturb ourselves over 
 these nice distinctions. We see men who are 
 cultivated chiefly on the side of intellect; 
 others we think of in terms of goodness, lovers 
 of their fellow men, seekers after moral and 
 social perfection; and we know those whom 
 metre or music or color or form sets vibrating 
 — the artists. 
 
 The ideal man possesses taste and sympa- 
 thy, the qualities common to all of these. He is 
 not a specialist — for to be a specialist almost 
 inevitably limits open-mindedness and sym- 
 pathy. He is cultivated rather than learned; 
 and nothing about him, not even his talk, will 
 appear salient or aggressive, but all will be 
 natural, and whatever he has acquired from 
 learning, life, or art will flow from him as 
 simply as fragrance from a flower. By his 
 manners you shall know him — manners 
 which register self-control and kindliness, 
 justice, magnanimity, and fairness. 
 
 That is not Culture which does not event- 
 uate in the gentleman. A glow of chivalry 
 
io8 GERMANY vs. CIVILIZATION 
 
 clings about it. We see it in Sir Philip Sid- 
 ney's beautiful, simple courtesy to the dying 
 soldier. It can manifest itself through the 
 highest heroism and through the contacts of 
 everyday life. Although known by what it 
 avoids doing, it is as affirmative as sunshine 
 or as health. But why multiply phrases when 
 Culture speaks for itself? 
 
 Culture of the broad and hospitable kind 
 has found only a scanty soil in Germany, and 
 until Goethe came, it had in fact hardly 
 sprouted there. In a community where the 
 standards of living not less than of learning 
 lagged behind those of Germany's neighbors, 
 Goethe's insatiate curiosity soon exhausted its 
 German provender and seized upon the Re- 
 naissance and Classical Antiquity to enrich his 
 poetic genius. But the culture which Goethe 
 exemplified better than any other modern 
 was that of an Olympian egotism. Cultivate 
 yourself for yourself; act as if the law of your 
 being were universal law : does not this advice 
 underlie the Goethean system? 
 
PRUSSIANIZING GERMANY 109 
 
 Goethe quickened wide interests among 
 the Germans, and contributed more than all 
 of them combined to the store of world- 
 literature ; but the culture which they learned 
 from him was the culture of erudition and 
 of egotism. They ransacked the libraries for 
 subjects great and small, inspected each 
 through the microscope, held post-mortems 
 on every figure in art, letters, science, and 
 history, and buried each under a mound — 
 in Goethe's case, a mountain — of treatises, 
 through which we tunnel with difficulty, if at 
 all, to the original. The German passion for 
 thoroughness stood between them and Cul- 
 ture of the higher sort, that Culture with 
 which the qualities of a gentleman, not those 
 of a pedant or a soldier, are inherently asso- 
 ciated. It is significant that the German lan- 
 guage has no word for gentleman. The gen- 
 tleman cannot be created by pinning an iron 
 cross or a red eagle on the lapel of an army 
 officer or of a university luminary, or by 
 dubbing him "von." 
 
no GERMANY vs, CIVILIZATION 
 
 With the expansion of science, in which the 
 Germans took a leading part, the idea of Cul- 
 ture as a possession of the soul dwindled away, 
 and in its place loomed up Kultur, a product 
 of the intellect. For a while Kultur meant 
 to the Germans Civilization, "that complex 
 whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, 
 morals, law, custom, and any other capabili- 
 ties and habits acquired by man as a member 
 of society." But little by little Kultur, when 
 used in reference to matters German, ac- 
 quired a restricted meaning. It no longer 
 concerned the individual, nor did it suggest 
 personal refinement. Kultur meant specific- 
 ally the system which ruled Germany, and 
 as that system became Prussianized, Kultur 
 was Prussianized. During the past twenty 
 years its definition has been: Whatever 
 strengthens the German Empire under the 
 dynasty of Hohenzollern is Kultur. 
 
 The Army, therefore, as William II has 
 reiterated throughout his reign, is the cardi- 
 nal instrument and prop of Kultur, and the 
 
PRUSSIANIZING GERMANY in 
 
 Krupp howitzer is its fittest emblem. Edu- 
 cation, which taught submissiveness and 
 instilled into the youngest pupil the com- 
 mandments of Kultur, came next, but an un- 
 bridgeable abyss separated the educators from 
 the privileged militarist class. To the Ger- 
 man people, as we have already witnessed, 
 such discrimination seemed proper, and to the 
 Prussians the idea that the monarch should 
 be despotic was as natural as that a tiger 
 should be striped. Frederick the Great on his 
 walks through Berlin used to cane any bur- 
 gher whose aspect happened to displease him; 
 and his loyal Berliners, instead of being in- 
 censed, may have felt honored by the chas- 
 tisement. William II used more insidious 
 means than caning to express his displeasure; 
 but the disposition on the part of the Prus- 
 sians to accept whatever the monarch deigned 
 to bestow, was not less subservient than in 
 Frederick's time. 
 
 The guiding principle of Kultur is unques- 
 tioning duty to the State. Its aim is Efficiency, 
 
112 GERMANY vs. CIVILIZATION 
 
 and never has another nation brought Effi- 
 ciency to such perfecticfn. But to what pur- 
 pose? Culture, according to Arnold, strives 
 "to make Reason and the will of God prevail/' 
 Kultur, on the contrary, aims to make the 
 German Empire under the House of Hohen- 
 zollem prevail; it would be rash to identify 
 either of these with Reason and the will of 
 God. 
 
 From whatever angle we have looked at 
 the Germanic development in recent genera- 
 tions, our vision has always fixed, sooner or 
 later, on an impenetrable core of egotism which 
 easily swells to arrogance, and from arro- 
 gance to insolence. The victories of 1870 gave 
 cause for military exultation. German schol- 
 arship had the cry, and no German professor 
 would admit that he could think of himself 
 more highly than he ought to think. The 
 German imagination peopled the past with 
 vague and vast achievements performed by 
 heroes — German, always German — more 
 than mortal. 
 
PRUSSIANIZING GERMANY 113 
 
 Coming very late into the comity of nations, 
 the Germans were at the disadvantage of 
 nourishing their minds on their home-made 
 philosophy and literature of yesterday or 
 today. Now, if their philosophers had been 
 Plato and Aristotle, and their poets Dante 
 and Shakespeare, the fact that they were al- 
 most if not quite contemporary would have 
 detracted somewhat from their value as 
 guides. The Germans bred in and in, a proc- 
 ess which leads to egomania if not to insanity. 
 The Englishman is insular, but his tradi- 
 tional training in the Classics and his transac- 
 tions in the world's business have given him 
 that breadth of view which comes from know- 
 ing intimately the history and ideals of great 
 races far removed in time and blood from 
 ourselves, and from actual cosmopolitanism. 
 So was it with the Puritans, who fed on the 
 Bible, which, besides providing them with 
 their religion, unfolded to them also the ways 
 of remote but mighty races. 
 
 The recent German, on the contrary, has 
 
114 GERMANY vs. CIVILIZATION 
 
 been brought up to suppose that whatever 
 was not German was inferior, to be tolerated 
 only until it could be replaced by a German 
 product, or, if not replaced, destroyed. Not 
 content with puffing themselves up, the Ger- 
 mans have lately listened complacently to 
 zealots who claim that it was a hidden Ger- 
 manicism in Dante, Shakespeare, and other 
 foreign masters ^ which made them great, 
 and that even Jesus Christ was honored by 
 having a strain of Teutonic blood in his veins. 
 If certain grave professors tell the truth, there 
 have been only two literatures worthy of 
 consideration — the German and the Greek. 
 
 ^ See Ludwig Woltmann's treatises. Vinci, he asserts, 
 is plainly the German Wincke; Vecellio is Vetzel; Buon- 
 arotti is Bohnrodt! He claims as Germans many French 
 celebrities — Lafayette, Pascal, Voltaire, Cuvier, Des- 
 cartes, Robespierre, Balzac, Musset, Lamartine, Hugo, 
 Zola, and many others. Even if these claims were estab- 
 lished, should we not ask: Why has Germany produced no 
 Titians and Michael Angelos and Leonardos herself? Why 
 no Voltaires and Balzacs and Hugos? If these types of 
 genius appear in Italy and in France and not in Germany, 
 a non-Kultured logic would deduce that it must be the 
 Italian or the French strain in the blood, and not the Ger- 
 man, which produced them. 
 
PRUSSIANIZING GERMANY 115 
 
 To paraphrase what Whistler said of Nature, 
 "Why drag in the Greek?" 
 
 A man who spends his life looking at him- 
 self in the glass cannot fail to reach the con- 
 clusion that he is unique, perfect, the pattern 
 and standard of all men. This has been Ger- 
 many's attitude for five-and-twenty years. 
 Although Germans have traveled to all parts 
 of the earth, establishing industrial colonies, 
 prospecting for commercial enterprises, or 
 filling professors' chairs, they have been so 
 swallowed up by their Germanism that they 
 have not understood the natures of the peo- 
 ples among whom they moved. To a German 
 the "psychology" of every one else is a sealed 
 book. How could it be otherwise? For be- 
 tween the German and you and me, when he 
 looks at us, there is the mirror, invisible to 
 you and me, in which he is doting over his 
 own features. 
 
 Far, indeed, has Kultur strayed from 
 Culture — Kultur so repulsively self-bloated, 
 wearing its ego on the outside, as the turtle 
 
ii6 GERMANY vs, CIVILIZATION 
 
 wears its skeleton, till it becomes thick, in- 
 durated, and at last, impenetrable; Culture, 
 which looks beyond itself, seeks the best 
 wherever it exists, recognizes the validity of 
 different standards, and practices tolerance 
 without in the least surrendering convictions. 
 As Kultur has trumpeted its own praises 
 everywhere, it is unnecessary to cite many 
 specimens of it. I content myself with quot- 
 ing a few lines from a letter written to a friend 
 in Holland by Dr. Adolf Lassen, Professor of 
 the Love of Wisdom (Philosophy), at the 
 University of Berlin. The letter was written 
 in the third month of the war: — 
 
 No one can remain neutral to the German 
 State and people. Either you must consider it 
 the most perfect creation that history has pro- 
 duced up to now, or you acquiesce in its de- 
 struction; nay, in its extermination. A man who 
 is not a German, knows nothing of Germany. 
 We are morally and intellectually superior be- 
 yond all comparison as to our organizations and 
 our institutions. . . . Our Army is the epitome 
 of German excellence. 
 
PRUSSIANIZING GERMANY 117 
 
 As Professor Lassen was eighty-four years 
 old when he wrote this, we have a right to 
 assume that his opinions were dehberate and 
 mature, free aUke from the exaggerations of 
 a callow partisan and from the explosive fury 
 of a young fanatic. 
 
 When an octogenarian, delivering himself 
 in this fashion, represents the whirling 
 thoughts of an entire nation, war must be 
 imminent. The only alternative to war would 
 be the insane asylum: but even Germany, 
 with all her preparation, had made no pro- 
 vision for locking herself up. If a man tells 
 you that he is the most perfect creation on 
 earth, the sacred vessel in whom is preserved 
 the essentials of the highest civilization, you 
 dissemble your amusement and pass on. For 
 a nation to make such a boast without 
 blushing — Kultur never blushes — portends 
 evil. 
 
 The stages by which Kultur led up to war 
 ^re thus plain. First, it Prussianized the Ger- 
 man people, by teaching the non-German 
 
ii8 GERMANY vs. CIVILIZATION 
 
 States that the interests of the Empire co- 
 incided with those of Prussia. Next, it kept 
 assuring the Germans that they were the most 
 marvelous of all races, an assertion which 
 they had no reluctance in believing. And 
 then Kultur preached that the other Powers, 
 secretly conscious of their inferiority, were 
 devoured by jealousy of Germany's superior- 
 ity, and that, foreseeing that they must go 
 down before it, they formed a league to ward 
 off their own destruction by crushing Ger- 
 many. This suggestion, artfully insinuated 
 and repeated every day from all quarters 
 throughout many years, became an over- 
 whelming obsession. 
 
 The German Army, with the Krupp how- 
 itzer as its highest product, embodied Kultur; 
 and the nation, obsessed to the point of fury, 
 felt relief from suspense when its masters 
 hurled the Army against the league of foes. 
 
CHAPTER IX 
 
 HOW THE ATROCIOUS WAR BEGAN 
 
 Forgetful is green earth; the Gods alone 
 Remember everlastingly: they strike 
 Remorselessly, and ever like for like. 
 By their great memories the Gods are known. 
 George Meredith: France: December y 1870. 
 
 THE Kaiser and his Ring have not been 
 able to evade the guih of beginning this 
 war. The inky stream, which, Hke the cuttle- 
 fish, they have emitted in their efforts to es- 
 cape, has not availed them. Their garbled or 
 faked documents, slyly mixed in with bits of 
 genuine evidence, have been exposed. After 
 all, however, in fixing the responsibility for 
 a vast conflict, the historian seeks to know, 
 not only who kindled the spark that set off 
 the explosion, but also who accumulated the 
 powder to be exploded, and who would bene- 
 fit most by the explosion. 
 
 On their own confession, the Germans have 
 been for years fully prepared for war. "Hur- 
 
120 GERiMANY vs. CIVILIZATION 
 
 rah for the dry powder and the sharp sword," 
 the Kaiser shouted long ago; "for the end we 
 have in sight and the forces we are bending 
 towards it, for the German Army and the 
 General Staff!" And on another occasion he 
 declared: "The Teuton never fights better 
 than when he is called upon to defend himself 
 on all sides. So let our enemies begin. We 
 are ready for them all ! '' 
 
 Nobody has questioned Germany's mate- 
 rial preparedness. But what of her will, what 
 of her desires? Has she been harboring reso- 
 lutions of peace ? Has she been contented with 
 her position as one of the European Powers ? 
 Has she never hinted that her increase in 
 population not less than her industrial expan- 
 sion called for territorial and colonial aggran- 
 dizement? Who was it that declared, as far 
 back as June i8, 1891: "In spite of the fact 
 that we have no such fleet as we should have, 
 we have conquered for ourselves a place in the 
 sun. It will now be my task to see to it that 
 this place in the sun shall remain our undis- 
 
HOW THE WAR BEGAN 121 
 
 puted possession ... for our future lies upon 
 the water".? 
 
 The desire and the will to conquer were in 
 the hearts of the Germans. The other Pow- 
 ers — England, France, and Russia — would 
 unquestionably have been glad to see Ger- 
 many humbled; but neither singly nor in 
 coalition would they attack her; and, with 
 what seems now fatuous trustfulness, the 
 English, at least, refused to believe that the 
 Germans would carry out the project towards 
 which their preparation pointed. Since 1905, 
 the agreement entered into by the Triple 
 Entente — England, France, and Russia — 
 aimed at mutual defense in case Germany 
 should assail any of them. The will to attack 
 dwelt in the Kaiser and his military chiefs. 
 Their sole concern was to choose the propi- 
 tious moment. 
 
 Why did they regard the last of July, 1914, 
 as the appointed time? William's golden 
 opportunity came in 1905 when Russia, in 
 a death-grapple with Japan, could not assist 
 
122 GERMANY vs, CIVILIZATION 
 
 France, which he wished then to shatter be- 
 yond recovery. But he did not feel quite sure 
 of England's neutrality; and as France bowed 
 her head at his threats, he decided to sheathe 
 his sword, and during the next seven or eight 
 years he contented himself with rattling his 
 scabbard. 
 
 The Balkan War of 1912 bristled with in- 
 ternational asperities, any one of which might 
 have served as an excuse to the great Powers 
 for entering the conflict; but they refrained. 
 The next year, however, Germany thought 
 the time ripe. Austria, her willing vassal, 
 acquiesced, and sounded Italy, their partner 
 in the Triple Alliance; but Italy refused to 
 join them, because they were bent on a war 
 of conquest, whereas the terms of partnership 
 required Italy's cooperation only for a war of 
 defense. 
 
 When 1914 came, William II determined 
 to wait no longer. He planned that Austria 
 should be his cat's-paw to reduce Servia to 
 vassalage, and so both to push forward Teu- 
 
HOW THE WAR BEGAN 123 
 
 tonic ascendency in the Balkans and to humil- 
 iate Russia, as Austria, abetted by Germany, 
 had humiliated her in 1909 by annexing Bos- 
 nia and Herzegovina. The conditions as he 
 and his Ring saw them were so favorable that 
 it mattered little what Italy did. Of his own 
 strength he had no doubts. The German 
 Army had been increased, and the fruits of 
 the five per cent patriotic contribution had 
 served in many ways to complete prepara- 
 tions. The Kiel Canal, which as a means of 
 naval strategy was worth more than several 
 dreadnoughts, had been dedicated in June 
 and was in perfect running order. The Ger- 
 man Navy itself, although evidently inferior 
 to the British, seemed to the eager Kaiser so 
 formidable that it might play a great part in 
 the war. 
 
 But the unreadiness of his enemies, rather 
 than his own strength, persuaded him. France 
 was reducing her term of military service, 
 and with it, in the opinion of many critics, 
 the efficiency of her Army. It was no secret 
 
124 GERMANY vs. CIVILIZATION 
 
 that she had reached the limit in her con- 
 scription. Her lack of artillery and other 
 equipment was so notorious that Deputy 
 Humbert had publicly exposed it in the 
 Chamber of Deputies. An unsavory scandal, 
 involving even Cabinet Ministers, aroused 
 fierce dissensions and was construed as a symp- 
 tom of a far-reaching corruption which would 
 paralyze national energy, if a sudden call 
 were made upon it. In Russia, also, internal 
 unrest seethed. Several hundred thousand 
 strikers at St. Petersburg had to be quelled 
 by the troops. German spies had doubtless 
 reported that Russia's store of munitions 
 would not suffice for a long campaign. Worse 
 still, Russia was just midway in changing 
 from the old to the new army system. The 
 Russian strategic railways, planned to en- 
 able her to pour her millions of soldiers on 
 to the German and Austrian frontiers, would 
 not be finished till 1917 — a fact which 
 warned William to make haste. 
 Although he appears to have felt a slight 
 
HOW THE WAR BEGAN 125 
 
 uncertainty as to England's probable course, 
 he believed that the odds lay greatly against 
 her breaking away from her traditional neu- 
 tral policy. Early in May, he instructed his 
 Ambassador at London, to discover if he could 
 — without allowing his purpose to be sus- 
 pected — whether, in case of a general Conti- 
 nental war, England would fight or not. Prince 
 Lichnowsky, his Ambassador, is said to have 
 sent a most reassuring report, in which he 
 showed that Great Britain was in no condition 
 to fight. Her quarrels over Home Rule and 
 Ulster had reached the verge of civil war; 
 party strife had fomented discord so bitter 
 that no united national action was to be looked 
 for; labor was in revolt; the pusillanimity of 
 the Cabinet could be measured by the extent 
 to which a handful of Suffragettes had terror- 
 ized it and the country. Underlying all was 
 the fact, amply proved by the Boer War, that 
 the English had ceased to be a martial people. 
 Wealth, sapping their valor, made them prefer 
 peace, the condition which promotes wealth. 
 
126 GERMANY vs. CIVILIZATION 
 
 So the Kaiser could push Austria into war 
 with a light heart. Needing a pretext, he 
 pitched upon the assassination of the Aus- 
 trian Crown Prince by a Serb, and encouraged 
 Austria to make demands so exorbitant that, 
 if Serbia assented to them, she would vir- 
 tually forfeit her independence. Throughout 
 the month of July such warlike preparations 
 went forward in Germany as would not ex- 
 cite suspicion. Forebodings, doubts, rumors, 
 came and went in the European press, but 
 they seemed baseless, and the public refused 
 to believe that the murder of a single indi- 
 vidual, even though he were an Austrian 
 Archduke, would lead to war. Pretending 
 that the matter concerned Austria alone, 
 Germany kept herself aloof, only insisting 
 that Austria should have a free hand. In 
 spite of these German denials of collusion, 
 there is ample reason to believe that the 
 Kaiser, about the middle of July, saw and 
 approved Austria's ultimatum to Serbia, and 
 then he went off yachting in order to create 
 
HOW THE WAR BEGAN 127 
 
 the impression that he was not implicated 
 in the negotiations which were designed to 
 make war inevitable. These subterfuges had 
 so quieting an effect outside of Germany and 
 Austria, that European diplomats and for- 
 eign ministers began to think of summer vaca- 
 tions. The French President, indeed, cruised 
 in the Baltic and paid an official visit to the 
 Czar. 
 
 On July 23 the Austrian ultimatum was 
 delivered at Belgrade. The next day Europe 
 took a sudden anxious interest in the affair. 
 At six o'clock in the evening of July 25 the 
 Austrian Minister at Belgrade, having barely 
 glanced at it, stated that, since Serbia's re- 
 sponse to the ultimatum was not satisfac- 
 tory, he was instructed to break off diplo- 
 matic relations. That same night, while he 
 and his staff were traveling to Vienna, Aus- 
 tria issued orders to mobilize the army. And 
 yet Serbia had conceded nearly all the de- 
 mands of the Austrian Empire, except that 
 which meant the extinction of her national 
 
128 GERMANY vs. CIVILIZATION 
 
 independence. The brave little kingdom, 
 recently wasted by two terrible wars, num- 
 bered only five million inhabitants; Austria 
 had more than fifty million. 
 
 From the moment the ultimatum was sent, 
 France and England urged Austria to con- 
 sider the possible fearful results of carrying 
 out her threat. They also urged Germany to 
 bring pressure to bear on her Austrian vassal. 
 Russia made it clear enough that she did not 
 desire war, but that she would not allow Ser- 
 bia to be crushed. Austria took a high-handed 
 attitude. 
 
 Suddenly, on the evening of July 26, Em- 
 peror William returned to Berlin. As he en- 
 tered the room where the military and cabinet 
 chiefs were conferring, the Crown Prince said 
 to him, sarcastically: "Father, you arrive too 
 late!'* It having been tacitly agreed that 
 they should make war inevitable during the 
 Kaiser's absence, — to shield him, — they 
 did not wish him to muddle what they 
 had done. 
 
HOW THE WAR BEGAN 129 
 
 But the Over-War-Lord could be trusted 
 to seize the occasion which he had impatiently 
 waited for during many years. He sent eva- 
 sive telegrams to his cousins, King George 
 of England and Czar Nicholas of Russia. So 
 far as appears, neither he nor Chancellor 
 Bethmann-HoUweg nor Foreign Secretary 
 Jagow had hinted to Austria, not that she 
 should soften her demands, but even that she 
 should refrain from pressing them for a few 
 days. The Kaiser insisted that it was none of 
 Europe's business whether Austria trounced 
 Serbia or not; and so he logically approved 
 of Austria's mobilization, while declaring to 
 the Czar that if Russia mobilized, mediation 
 would be " threatened if not made impossible." 
 The Czar gave his solemn promise that as 
 long as negotiations between Austria and 
 Serbia continued, his troops would undertake 
 no provocative action. 
 
 Suddenly, for some reason still unexplained, 
 on July 31, Austria consented to enter into 
 informal "conversations'' with Russia — an 
 
130 GERMANY vs. CIVILIZATION 
 
 indication, optimists thought, that war might 
 be averted; because up to the day before she 
 had insisted that her deahngs with Serbia 
 were a private affair, which she would discuss 
 with nobody else. Who at Vienna suddenly 
 waked up to the fact that the War Cabal in 
 the Army and Cabinet, in collusion with the 
 German Ambassador, was involving Austria, 
 not merely in a brush with the Serbian 
 pygmy, but in a European War of incalcula- 
 ble scope? Even a day's delay for "conversa- 
 tions" might check the militarist plunge into 
 war. 
 
 William, however, although he knew of 
 Austria's offer to "converse," frustrated this 
 eleventh-hour hesitation, and saw to it that 
 war should come. At midnight on July 31 
 he telegraphed an ultimatum to St. Peters- 
 burg, saying that, unless Russia ceased within 
 twelve hours all warlike measures against 
 both Germany and Austria, Germany would 
 mobilize. Only one construction can be placed 
 on this ultimatum — William purposed that 
 
HOW THE WAR BEGAN 131 
 
 It should force Russia to fight. When Russia 
 allowed the twelve hours to elapse without 
 obeying William's command, he declared war 
 upon her. On that same July 3 1 the German 
 Ambassador in Paris addressed a menacing 
 communication to the French Government, 
 demanding to know within eighteen hours 
 whether France would remain neutral in case 
 of war between Germany and Russia. De- 
 clining to give any pledge, Viviani, the French 
 Prime Minister, simply stated that France 
 would consult her own interests. 
 
 On August 2, the German troops went 
 swarming through Luxemburg, and massed 
 on the Belgian frontier. Germany postponed 
 formally declaring war, although she was ac- 
 tually at war, in the hope that some chance 
 shot might justify her in asserting that France 
 began hostilities.^ The Kaiser resorted to this 
 guile, which was as transparent as it was 
 specious, in order to hold Italy to those terms 
 
 * German apologists subsequently laid great stress on 
 the report that two French officers were seen motoring on 
 a Belgian road before war was declared! 
 
132 GERMANY vs. CIVILIZATION 
 
 of the Triple Alliance which bound her to 
 join the Teutonic Powers in case they were 
 attacked. The Italians were not deceived. 
 By their refusal to be drawn into the war of 
 aggression, the Teutons stand convicted. 
 
 This long record of Germany's preparation 
 for the war leaves no doubt as to her guilt. 
 If any persons are still duped into thinking 
 the Kaiser sincere when he protested his love 
 of peace, let them explain why he did not, as 
 a friend, dissuade Austria from flinging at 
 Serbia the firebrand ultimatum. Let them 
 explain why, when the firebrand had been 
 hurled and Austria was bombarding Belgrade, 
 he declared truculently that the affair did not 
 concern Europe, and intimated that he would 
 allow no meddling. When had Europe au- 
 thorized him to prescribe for her the limits 
 of her jurisdiction ? Finally, let them explain 
 why, when Austria paused to "converse" 
 with Russia, he sent the Czar the ultimatum 
 which could mean only war. That he ordered 
 his troops to invade Belgium and France 
 
HOW THE WAR BEGAN 133 
 
 before declaring war, would of itself discredit 
 his pretended reverence for peace. It was the 
 last link in the chain of hypocrisy, stretching 
 back over twenty-five years. 
 
 Thus the Atrocious War began, and atro- 
 cious in history will be William who began it. 
 
 As we picture him watching his neighbors 
 year after year and waiting till he judged the 
 moment ripe for smiting them, we have a 
 vision of a butcher who goes out every day 
 to look over his cattle, and even hands them 
 wisps of hay to make them believe that he is 
 peaceable and friendly; and then the morn- 
 ing comes when he hurries them off to the 
 shambles. Such is the role played by a 
 War-Lord, drunk with ambition for world- 
 dominion.^ 
 
 * The first sources for the diplomacy which led up to the 
 War are, of course, the Official Papers of the various belli- 
 gerents. The best brief analysis of these is in The Evidence 
 in the Case, by James M. Beck. (New York: Putnam, 
 191 4.) An exhaustive treatise is that of Ellery C. Stowell: 
 The Diplomacy of the War oj 1914^ vol. I. (Boston: Hough- 
 ton Mifflin Co. 1915.) 
 
CHAPTER X 
 
 BELGIUM 
 
 All pity choked with custom of fell deeds: 
 
 That this foul deed shall smell above the earth 
 With carrion men, groaning for burial. 
 
 Shakespeare: Julius Ccssar, in, i. 
 
 DURING the last days of July, 1914, 
 seven and a half million Belgian men, 
 women, and children lived their ordinary 
 lives, industrious, peaceful, and thrifty peo- 
 ple, little blazoned in the world's dispatches. 
 A fortnight later, Belgium had suffered mar- 
 tyrdom which will keep her name and that of 
 her destroyer alive as long as posterity shall 
 remember examples of supreme heroism and 
 of Satanic guilt. So nigh was grandeur to her 
 dust, and so unsuspected by those in whom 
 it dwelt! 
 
 During fourscore years Belgium had existed 
 as an independent nation, coveted alike by 
 France and Germany, but unharmed by both; 
 
BELGIUM 135 
 
 for her right to existence had been guaran- 
 teed by the great Powers. Even in 1870, when 
 Prussia was hurling her armies against France, 
 and the passage through Belgium would have 
 been most useful, Bismarck showed sufficient 
 regard for public opinion in Europe and 
 America to declare that Prussia would not 
 violate the neutrality of Belgium. Bismarck 
 pricked any of the Ten Commandments like 
 a bubble, when he thought he could gain 
 anything thereby; but, being a statesman, 
 he avoided wanton lawlessness, not because 
 it was wanton, but because it was bad state- 
 craft. 
 
 William II, however, who deemed himself 
 greater than Bismarck, thought that he 
 proved his superiority by violating all laws. 
 ^ On the morning of August 4 he sent his 
 troops into Belgium. That same afternoon, 
 when Sir Edward Goschen interviewed the 
 German Chancellor, in the forlorn hope that 
 the avalanche of war already started might 
 be checked mid-course, he found Bethmann- 
 
136 GERMANY vs. CIVILIZATION 
 
 Hollweg "very agitated." For England had 
 announced that, if Belgium were invaded, she 
 would fulfil her solemn promise to defend Bel- 
 gian neutrality. "His Excellency," Goschen 
 records, "at once began a harangue which 
 lasted for about twenty minutes. He said 
 that the step taken by the [British] Govern- 
 ment was terrible to a degree; just for a word 
 — 'neutrahty,' a word which in war-time has 
 so often been disregarded — just for a scrap 
 of paper y Great Britain was going to make 
 war on a kindred nation who desired nothing 
 better than to be friends with her." ^ That 
 "scrap of paper," torn by the command of 
 the impatient Kaiser, will float for ages on 
 every wind as an indictment of his crime. 
 
 On that same day, August 4, Bethmann- 
 Hollweg made this explanation to the Ger- 
 man Reichstag: — 
 
 Gentlemen, we are now in a state of necessity, 
 and necessity knows no law! Our troops have 
 occupied Luxemburg, and perhaps [as a matter 
 
 » Stowell, I, 365. 
 
BELGIUM 137 
 
 of fact the speaker knew that Belgium had been 
 invaded that morning] are already on Belgian 
 soil. Gentlemen, that is contrary to the dic- 
 tates of international law. It is true that the 
 French Government has declared at Brussels 
 that France is willing to respect the neutrality 
 of Belgium as long as her opponent respects it. 
 We knew, however, that France stood ready 
 for the invasion. France could wait, but we 
 could not wait. A French movement upon our 
 flank upon the lower Rhine might have been 
 disastrous. So we were compelled to override 
 the just protest of the Luxemburg and Belgian 
 Governments. The wrong — I speak openly 
 — that we are committing, we will endeavor to 
 make good as soon as our military goal has been 
 reached. Anybody who is threatened, as we are 
 threatened and is fighting for his highest posses- 
 sions, can have only one thought — how he is 
 to hack his way through 1 ^ 
 
 These words, blurted out by the Chancellor 
 in palliation of Germany's crime, will be 
 stamped as indelibly on the pages of history 
 as was Belshazzar's condemnation on the wall 
 of his banquet-room. Addressing the members 
 
 1 Stowell, I, 445-46. 
 
138 GERMANY vs. CIVILIZATION 
 
 of the Reichstag, into whom the venom of 
 Kultur had penetrated, Bethmann-Hollweg 
 knew that his plea of necessity would be ac- 
 cepted as a matter of course: for the first prin- 
 :iple of Kultur teaches that whatever Prus- 
 sianized Germany wishes to do is therefore 
 "necessary." The burglar who, on being 
 caught, should protest that it was "necessary'' 
 for him to break a bank, would be only a ready 
 disciple of German Kultur. 
 
 So the Kaiser's troops violated the Belgian 
 frontier, and advanced with clatter of cavalry 
 scouts and goose-step tramp of infantry, with 
 rumble of cannon and whirr of myriad motors 
 and trucks, into the doomed country. "Let 
 us through!" shouted the Prussians; "let us 
 through, or we will hack our way through!" 
 And although Belgium was but a small coun- 
 try — her army at its maximum counting less 
 than one to ten of the Germans — knowing 
 the awful risk, she resolutely and without fear 
 blocked the way. In the face of men for all 
 time she bore witness that she set honor above 
 
BELGIUM 139 
 
 life, and she showed that valor, being of the 
 soul, bears no relation to bodily size. 
 
 At Liege she checked the onslaught of the 
 Germans, who were at first surprised by her 
 foolhardiness, and then infuriated. They 
 quickly threw off the restraints of civilized 
 warfare, in which they were never at ease, and 
 proved themselves in acts the Huns they were 
 at heart, if not by descent. Repulsed again 
 and again from the forts of Liege, they had to 
 wait until the mass of their troops came up, 
 regiment after regiment, like the successive 
 waves of a rising flood, with their monster 
 siege-guns, the latest achievement of Krupp 
 Kultur, before they could swamp the Belgian 
 defenders and pass on their way westward. 
 
 Glorious Liege ! Her name will shine beside 
 that of Thermopylae. Thrice fortunate the 
 heroes who died there defending their homes, 
 their country's honor, and civilization itself! 
 As long as time shall be, their example shall 
 hearten brave men to fight for liberty against 
 desperate odds ; and when this titanic struggle 
 
140 GERMANY vs. CIVILIZATION 
 
 between the armies of Might and the armies 
 of Right has closed, and the free nations of 
 the world look back upon it, they will over- 
 flow with gratitude for Liege. Six or seven 
 days are but a moment in a man's lifetime; 
 and yet the six or seven days during which 
 Liege blocked the onrush of the German 
 hordes, outweigh in fatefulness many a cen- 
 tury in the lifetime of civilization. They 
 saved France; with France, they saved the 
 cause of the Allies. That check shattered 
 the military plan which Germany had been 
 elaborating for forty years, the plan in which 
 every minute detail was worked out, every- 
 thing mechanical was provided for and under 
 control. One thing alone had Krupp Kultur 
 overlooked ; it had assumed that the Belgians 
 like the Germans were machines, not souls; 
 but that small, brave company of Belgian 
 souls at Liege rose up and dashed against 
 and dislocated the gigantic German machine, 
 and wrecked the mechanically perfect plan of 
 Krupp Kultur. The Germans never entered 
 
BELGIUM 141 
 
 Paris. On the contrary, they were driven 
 back from the Marne to the Aisne, and they 
 would have retreated to the Rhine, if the 
 French munitions had not given out. The 
 heroes of Liege had not died in vain. 
 
 Enraged by the resistance, perhaps stung 
 by the loathing with which the civilized world 
 greeted their declaration that their most sol- 
 emn promise was only a scrap of paper, the 
 Germans proceeded to wreak on innocent 
 Belgium their system of Frightfulness. The 
 horrors they committed in those weeks of 
 August and September cannot be put into 
 words. To whatever town they came, though 
 it were unfortified and undefended, they came 
 as Huns into whose ruthless hands modern 
 science had put tools of destruction unknown 
 to their ancestors. Attila's barbarians spread 
 fire from house to house by the torch; the bar- 
 barians of William II carried incendiary pas- 
 tilles, which they threw into rooms, and en- 
 gines filled with petroleum which they sprayed 
 on the condemned buildings. Here they 
 
142 GERMANY vs. CIVILIZATION 
 
 battered down by cannonade ; there they blew 
 up by dynamite. In the country, they demol- 
 ished the tiny villages, where only old men 
 and women and children lingered. And they 
 did not spare even the solitary peasant's cot- 
 tage. They looted first and then they laid 
 waste. In the cities of Flanders and Brabant 
 they made the masterpieces of the famous 
 architects who built in a golden age their 
 special butt, as if the mere sight of Beauty 
 maddened them. 
 
 But it was upon living, human beings 
 that German Frightfulness, formulated by 
 the General Staff and sanctioned by Empe- 
 ror William, vented itself without mercy. 
 Scarcely a place escaped horror in one or 
 many forms. Unarmed men, burgomasters 
 and local notables, quiet shopkeepers, work- 
 men and servants, were seized, maltreated, 
 killed, some without warning, others after 
 prolonged suspense, and the refinement of 
 cruelty. 
 
 We read that the Kaiser's minions took a 
 
BELGIUM 143 
 
 father and son into a garden, shot the son, 
 compelled the father to stand at the feet of 
 the corpse, and then shot him. They com- 
 pelled wives to look on while their husbands 
 were shot, before subjecting the women to 
 outrage worse than death. They had no pity 
 for children. In a single house they dispatched 
 a little girl and her two smaller brothers ; and, 
 as if they were Herod's hirelings, they slaugh- 
 tered even infants, skewering some on their 
 bayonets, ripping or slashing others with 
 their swords. Where they did not kill, they 
 mutilated. They resorted to the savage 
 practice of taking hostages, whom they slew 
 if any irresponsible inhabitant was unruly or 
 committed a violent act or was suspected of 
 sniping. Often they did not wait for a pre- 
 text; but sometimes, as at Louvain, their 
 soldiers fired into the streets from the na- 
 tives' windows, and then, with the cry that 
 the Louvainers were sniping the Germans, 
 they redoubled their orgy of rape and pillage, 
 and arson and murder. Sometimes they led 
 
144 GERMANY vs. CIVILIZATION 
 
 out their victims in large batches and mas- 
 sacred them by forties and fifties and by hun- 
 dreds. In one town they herded a crowd of 
 men, women, and children into the market- 
 place, and opened fire upon them without 
 warning; and we hear that three little boys, 
 seeing their elders drop around them, clasped 
 each other tightly and died together when 
 the volley reached them. Once, at least, they 
 ranged their victims in two parallel lines, 
 those behind having to wait and behold those 
 in front fall, some killed, others writhing in 
 agony, before their own turn came. These 
 thorough Huns did not overlook priests ; hav- 
 ing compelled one cure to help in digging a 
 huge grave for a heap of slaughtered, they 
 then shot him, there being left a hole large 
 enough to roll his body into. Hellish was 
 their conduct towards women — w^omen? — 
 towards females of any age. In one village 
 a grandmother of eighty and a little girl of 
 eight succumbed to the lust of William's sol- 
 diers. The oflScers are accused of reserving 
 
BELGIUM 145 
 
 the best for themselves. Nor did horrors stop 
 on the threshold of nunneries. ^ 
 
 These things, being a part of history, must 
 be recorded here. I cite at random only a 
 few examples, few, but typical. Whoever 
 will, can read the infernal roster, in which the 
 number of individual victims mounts to 
 thousands and still is incomplete. Such acts 
 link William II of Hohenzollern in the same 
 exorbitance of atrocity with Nana Sahib of 
 Cawnpore. 
 
 The War-Lord who permitted his army to 
 inflict these horrors upon the noncombatant 
 civilians of entire provinces cannot be ex- 
 pected to forbid his soldiers in the field to 
 drive women and children before them to 
 screen them in an attack: nor could he be 
 so squeamish as to feel ashamed when they 
 fired upon ambulances, or shelled hospital 
 ships. 
 
 ^ See the Bryce Report, and the statements issued by 
 Professor Joseph Bedier for the French investigating com- 
 mittee. 
 
146 GERMANY vs. CIVILIZATION 
 
 In modern war, even as it has been fought 
 by civilized nations, the brutal passions which 
 were once uppermost in all men, but which 
 in most men have been slowly subdued, burst 
 into fierce activity. Indeed, war, being a re- 
 version to a barbaric state, is the natural envi- 
 ronment where these barbaric instincts flour- 
 ish. Rapine, murder, and pillage blacken the 
 annals of every campaign ; but the Germans 
 who practiced them on the Belgians in 19 14 
 were loaded with a special burden of guilt. 
 The apologist of Teuton ferocity cannot plead 
 that these fiendish acts were sporadic, or 
 were due to drunkenness, or to a sudden 
 explosion of fury, or to any other unpre- 
 meditated cause. In their system of war, the 
 Prussians not only foresaw but prescribed 
 their use. They knew that bloodthirstiness 
 and lust and the mania for destruction lie 
 very near the surface in soldiers, and they 
 touched off these passions as deliberately as 
 they exploded a mine. This they called 
 Frightfulness, and they thought that by 
 
BELGIUM 147 
 
 applying it in all its diabolical rigor they 
 could terrorize the Belgians into abject sub- 
 mission. Their self-centred psychology misled 
 them in this case as in many others. Are 
 we to infer that they would have been terror- 
 ized by such atrocities? They never broke 
 the Belgian spirit, and it was not until hun- 
 dreds of thousands of their troops bestrode 
 Belgium, that her gallant people ceased to 
 resist. 
 
 Then it was that the modern Huns dis- 
 covered that they had raised up against 
 themselves a record of infamy which all their 
 armies could not blot out, and which all the 
 victories they might win, were it that world- 
 dominion they coveted, could never con- 
 done. Human suffering speaks through dumb 
 mouths which no tyrant can smother. The 
 anguish and martyrdom suffered by the rav- 
 ished Belgian women, by the innocent little 
 children, by the unarmed men, old and young, 
 horrified every humane heart the wide world 
 round ; and though the Prussian dynasty were 
 
148 GERMANY vs. CIVILIZATION 
 
 to reign from now till Doomsday, on the brow 
 of each Hohenzollern despot, as he mounts 
 his throne, invisible hands will stamp the 
 name " Belgium," as ineffaceable as the brand 
 of Cain. 
 
CHAPTER XI 
 
 MENDACITY 
 
 Of every malice that wins hate in Heaven, 
 Injury is the end; and all such end 
 Either by force or fraud afflicteth others. 
 But because fraud is man's peculiar vice, 
 More it displeases God; and so stand lowest 
 The fraudulent, and great dole assails them. 
 Dante: Hell, xi, 22-27. (Longfellow's translation.) 
 
 NOT alone in Belgium did Prussian psy- 
 chology err. Regarding the Belgians 
 as so puny as to be negligible, and judging 
 them as if they were Germans, it had taken 
 it for granted that they would not oppose an 
 empire whose army outnumbered theirs by 
 ten to one; but the Belgians, reasoning and 
 feeling in quite un-Prussian ways, dared to 
 resist, and their resistance, as we have seen, 
 although it was brief, threw out of joint 
 the grand strategy of the German Staff. The 
 Kaiser did not celebrate Napoleon's Birth- 
 day by a dinner in Paris, as he had planned. 
 
150 GERMANY vs. CIVILIZATION 
 
 nor did he dictate overwhelming terms of 
 peace to France. Neither did he paralyze 
 Russia by a sudden drive. 
 
 German psychology, unhinged by Belgium's 
 courage, was smashed beyond repair by Eng- 
 land's decision. For England, instead of being 
 the weary Titan, afraid of Suffragettes and 
 terrified by Irish factions, instead of being a 
 sordid money-bags concerned only in amass- 
 ing wealth, declared that she would fulfil her 
 pledge and defend Belgium. She, at least, 
 would not subscribe to the Prussian doctrine 
 that small nations had no right to exist; and 
 although she had only " a gentleman's agree- 
 ment" with France, that to her was binding. 
 
 At the first suspicion that England's psy- 
 chology would not function as the Prussians 
 had calculated, the German Chancellor tried 
 to seduce her to desert France and Belgium. 
 In the German code, honor pledged in the past 
 is to be thrown over, if it prove inconvenient 
 in the present. To Bethmann-HoUweg this 
 was so self-evident a truth that he listened 
 
MENDACITY 151 
 
 with incredulity and then flew into wild rage 
 when he was told that England did not look 
 upon a solemn compact as "a mere scrap 
 of paper." The next day, when the British 
 Prime Minister told the Commons and the 
 world that no Englishman could listen to this 
 "infamous proposal," his laconic statement 
 required no amplification. Everywhere out- 
 side of Germany it was held to be obvious 
 that he could make no other. 
 
 Then burst upon England the wrath of 
 Kaiser and Chancellor, and of every German 
 who spoke out; and tiny boys and girls were 
 taught like parrots to repeat the curse, ''Goti 
 strafe England,'' — God punish England, — 
 and to glower with hate whenever they heard 
 England's name. So a robber, who is sur- 
 prised by a policeman just as he is in the 
 act of sandbagging a victim, turns with fury 
 upon the policeman, curses him and calls him 
 unfair and the despoiler of the ancient pro- 
 fession of robbers — the profession by which 
 the HohenzoUerns had thriven for centuries. 
 
152 GERMANY vs. CIVILIZATION 
 
 The frenzy into which Germany flew over 
 England's keeping her promise to defend 
 Belgium and the rights of small nations, be- 
 came chronic. It was a confession that she 
 was the ultimate enemy at whom the vast 
 German war preparations were aimed. The 
 official pretext alleged was that Germany 
 took up arms to save herself and the civiliza- 
 tion of Western Europe from the Slavic Peril. 
 We were asked to believe that the subjects 
 of the Hohenzollern and the Hapsburg Em- 
 perors lived in dread of being submerged by 
 a flood of Muscovite barbarians, which would 
 sweep away Kultur and the inferior but still 
 recognized civilization of England, France, 
 and Italy. The Czar's mobilization of part 
 of his army to succor Serbia, after Austria 
 had not only mobilized her troops, but was 
 actually bombarding the Serbian capital, was 
 advanced by the Germans as a sign that the 
 floodgates of the Slavic Peril had broken down. 
 Instead of making straight for Russia, how- 
 ever, the German armies made straight for 
 
MENDACITY 153 
 
 Belgium and France — a strange blunder in 
 geography for a people whose impeccable 
 maps were drawn by Kiepert and whose won- 
 derful guide-books were compiled by Bae- 
 deker! Only a commander-in-chief saturated 
 with the logic of Kultur would rush due west 
 to repel a foe who was massing his forces to 
 attack four hundred miles due east. 
 
 In truth, the Kaiser was simply carrying 
 out the plan laid down years before by the 
 General Staff: in spite of England's interfer- 
 ence, he still hoped to crush France before 
 English help could reach her. This accom- 
 plished, he counted on being able to ward 
 off an English descent on the French coast, 
 if one were attempted, — which seemed un- 
 likely, — and to detach the larger part of his 
 Western troops for service against Russia. 
 A desperate hope, quickly blasted by Sir 
 John French's masterly retreat and General 
 Joffre's victorious strategy. One morning the 
 Kaiser's scouts looked gloatingly down on 
 Paris from the terrace at Saint-Germain, as 
 
154 GERMANY vs. CIVILIZATION 
 
 on a treasure which they had only to stretch 
 out their hand to grasp; the next day those 
 scouts and all the Kaiser's corps were hur- 
 rying back from the Marne to the Aisne. 
 William had the satisfaction of sneering at 
 "England's contemptible little army"; but 
 Sir John French might well ask: "If eighty 
 thousand English soldiers sufficed to check 
 eight hundred thousand Germans, is 'con- 
 temptible' the fittest word to apply to them?" 
 From that time on, the Germans have 
 never disguised the fact that they regarded 
 England as their chief adversary, whom they 
 vowed to destruction. More than once, the 
 Kaiser strove to inveigle France and Russia, 
 either singly or together, to make a separate 
 peace, which would allow him to deal with 
 England alone; but both Russia and France 
 held true to their compact. The German 
 wrath against England was no sudden out- 
 break of hysteria in which one utters vain 
 ravings; it was deliberately stimulated and 
 fostered and passed on. 
 
MENDACITY 15^ 
 
 Lissauer popularized it in a "Hymn of 
 Hate," to be sung by civilians at their gath- 
 erings and by soldiers on the march or in the 
 trenches; and the Kaiser decorated Lissauer 
 for this addition to the hymnal of Kultur. 
 Journalists, politicians, bureaucrats, profes- 
 sors, retired army officers, vied with each 
 other in hurling invectives against the Eng- 
 lish. They even stooped to borrow some of 
 Napoleon's taunts — " perfidious Albion," " na- 
 tion of shopkeepers": and this was not un- 
 natural, because the Kaiser had unwittingly 
 involved himself in those British toils which 
 had slowly strangled and slain Napoleon. 
 
 If Kultur did not distort the vision of its 
 possessors whenever they look away from the 
 mirror which reflects themselves, the Kaiser 
 might have meditated on certain historic 
 coincidences. At the end of the sixteenth 
 century, it was England, a small and not 
 populous country, which shattered the world- 
 empire of Spain. A hundred years later, when 
 Louis XIV lorded it over half of Europe, it 
 
156 GERMANY vs. CIVILIZATION 
 
 was again England who shattered the power 
 of France. Another century passed and Eng- 
 land, the head of the European coalition, 
 which but for her would have dissolved in- 
 gloriously, smote Napoleon, whose empire 
 stretched from the Dnieper to Cadiz. His- 
 tory may not repeat itself in William's Atro- 
 cious War of 1914; and yet a historian cannot 
 fail to perceive that England is for the fourth 
 time championing Liberty against a would-be 
 world-despot. Hitherto the stars in their 
 courses have fought for her. 
 
 Very quickly the Prussian mask fell. It 
 was not French Revenge, not the Slavic Peril, 
 against which William made war, it was Eng- 
 land. Delenda est Britannia! — Britain must 
 be wiped out ! — that was the inspiration of 
 the long years of military preparation, of the 
 creation of a great German Navy, of the toast 
 to "The Day," of the truculence of the Ger- 
 man reptile press and of the Kaiser's amia- 
 ble references to peace. He had not intended, 
 however, to attack England until he had dis- 
 
MENDACITY 157 
 
 posed of France and Russia; but his own 
 bungling diplomacy ruined his scheme. Bis- 
 marck always arranged it so as to fight only 
 one enemy at a time : but William, knowing 
 better than Bismarck the rules of statecraft, 
 waited until all his enemies would unite to 
 take the field against him before he declared 
 war on one of them. 
 
 Nothing comparable to the frenzied out- 
 cries of the Germans, when they found that 
 they had leaped in the dark into a world-war, 
 has been heard in modern times. They raged 
 at England's "betrayal," berating her for not 
 telling them that she would keep her pledge 
 to Belgium, a rage which I have likened to 
 that of a footpad who is interrupted by the 
 appearance of a policeman. 
 
 More interesting, however, were the ex- 
 pressions of utter amazement which the Ger- 
 mans sent up on perceiving that civilized 
 people everywhere abhorred the German vio- 
 lation of Belgium and the sequent atrocities. 
 Their amazement, at least, was genuine; it 
 
158 GERMANY vs. CIVILIZATION 
 
 is an electric torch by which we can explore 
 the labyrinth of Kultur. They did not, they 
 could not understand how any foreigner could 
 be so foolish as to suppose that a treaty was 
 more than a scrap of paper, if its observance 
 incommoded Germany. 
 
 Among many manifestations of this sur- 
 prise none equaled the address issued early 
 in October, 1914, by the Ninety-three Intel- 
 lectuals. "As heralds of truth" these men, 
 who had enjoyed a reputation as pillars of 
 German scholarship, spoke the words they 
 were bidden to speak. Here are the heads of 
 their denials: — 
 
 It is not true that Germany Is guilty of having 
 caused this war. Neither the people, the Gov- 
 ernment, nor the Kaiser, wanted war. Ger- 
 many did her utmost to prevent it; for this 
 assertion the world has documentary proof. . . . 
 
 It is not true that we trespassed in neutral 
 Belgium. It has been proved that France and 
 England had resolved on such a trespass, and it 
 has likewise been proved that Belgium had 
 agreed to their doing so. . . . 
 
 It is not true that the life and property of a 
 
MENDACITY 159 
 
 single Belgian citizen was Injured by our sol- 
 diers without the bitterest self-defense having 
 made It necessary. . . . 
 
 It is not true that our troops treated Louvain 
 brutally. Furious Inhabitants having fallen 
 upon them treacherously In their quarters, our 
 troops, with aching hearts, were obliged to fire 
 a part of the town as a punishment. . . . 
 
 It is not true that our warfare pays no respect 
 to international laws. It knows no undisci- 
 plined cruelty. . . . 
 
 It is not true that the combat against our so- 
 called Militarism Is not a combat against our civ- 
 ilization [Kultur], as our enemies hypocritically 
 pretend it is. Were it not for German Militarism, 
 German Civilization [Kultur] would long since 
 have been extirpated. . . . 
 
 We shall search in vain for any counterpart 
 
 to this manifesto, which proved, as nothing 
 
 else could prove, the complete subservience 
 
 of the German university professors to the 
 
 Kaiser and his Ring. The Government 
 
 cracked the whip, and the Ninety-three fell 
 
 into line, clicked their heels together, saluted, 
 
 and repeated their formulas. Not in our 
 
 generation will German scholarship recover 
 
iGo GERMANY vs. CIVILIZATION 
 
 its prestige after such an exhibition. We were 
 told that German scholars were impersonal, 
 impartial, objective seekers for truth — 
 whether that truth were in science or in re- 
 ligion or in the humanities. What becomes 
 of that boast when Harnack and Haeckel and 
 Ostwald and Eduard Meyer sign such a paper 
 as this, containing statements not only unver- 
 ified but unverifiable, not only doubtful but 
 false .? What credence will non-Germans give 
 hereafter to Harnack and the Ninety-three 
 when they discourse on their specialties? 
 If Harnack could sign his name to the denial, 
 "// is not true that we trespassed in neutral 
 Belgium," how can we trust his assertions in 
 the Higher Criticism.? When we turn back to 
 the works which brought these men distinc- 
 tion, we shall see the shadow of suspicion on 
 every page: for we shall remember that the 
 mind which produced them was of such nature 
 — call it essentially unscientific or untruth- 
 ful — that it adopted eagerly the false state- 
 ments of the Address. 
 
MENDACITY 161 
 
 Incidentally, the Ninety-three confirm two 
 facts which many German apologists try to 
 evade : first, that, but for German Militarism, 
 German Kultur "would long since have been 
 extirpated"; and, secondly, that German 
 warfare "knows no undisciplined cruelty." 
 The cruelty it practices is premeditated, dis- 
 ciplined — in a word, Frightfulness. 
 
 Kultur was, as I have said, a process of 
 breeding in and in. It created a truly won- 
 derful efficiency among Germans in Germany ; 
 but, being based on egotism, it rendered them 
 less and less capable of understanding other 
 races; and this incapacity increased until 
 they made no pretense of understanding them. 
 They assumed that, as non-German peoples 
 were inferior, their "psychology" did not 
 matter. 
 
 Germany's decision to violate Belgium 
 dated from many years back. She constructed 
 a mesh of railroads to the Belgian frontiers, 
 massed troops and supplies there, took it to 
 be axiomatic that her armies would cross 
 
i62 GERMANY vs. CIVILIZATION 
 
 there — a "necessity/' as Bethmann-Holl- 
 weg baldly declared. Accordingly, her amaze- 
 ment was unfeigned when in her egomania 
 she made the discovery that the rest of the 
 world had not been assuming that Teutonic 
 plans and ambitions, and those alone, should 
 monopolize the attention of mankind. She 
 was as much astonished that foreigners should 
 be shocked by her violation of treaties and 
 by her damnably deliberate application of 
 Frightfulness, as Australian cannibals would 
 be to learn that cannibalism was abhorrent 
 to civilized men. The naivete of her aston- 
 ishment measures the insoluble residue of 
 barbarism in the German nature — even in 
 the Ninety-three Intellectuals. 
 
 '*The Prussian," Goethe is reported to 
 have said, "is cruel by birth; civilization will 
 make him ferocious." Goethe was not a 
 Prussian, but he will be hailed as a prophet, 
 if in the far retrospect the ferocity which the 
 Prussianized Germans have displayed in the 
 Atrocious War shall prove to be the inevi- 
 
MENDACITY 163 
 
 table reaction of Civilization on Kultur. The 
 champions of Kultur, who had been telling 
 each other that they were the greatest beings 
 in the world, who have even invented a new 
 class of mammals, Supermen, to which they 
 alone belonged, were maddened when Civili- 
 zation, which they discarded, dared to plant 
 itself in the path of Kultur. 
 
 Besides cruelty, the Prussians possessed in 
 a superlative degree another barbaric trait. 
 The late Charles Francis Adams, writing a 
 few days before his death in March, 191 5, 
 criticizing the plea of German apologists that 
 Americans did not understand because they 
 could not "think like Germans," said: — 
 
 Suspecting this in my own case, I have of late 
 confined my reading on this topic almost ex- 
 clusively to German sources. I have been taking 
 a course in Nietzsche and Treitschke, as also 
 in the German "Denkschrift," illumined by ex- 
 cerpts from the German papers in this country 
 and the official utterances of Chancellor von 
 Bethmann-Hollweg. The result has been most 
 disastrous. It has utterly destroyed my capacity 
 for judicial consideration. I can only say that 
 
i64 GERMANY vs. CIVILIZATION 
 
 if what I find In those sources is the capacity 
 to think Germanlcally, I would rather cease 
 thinking at all. It is the absolute negation of 
 everything which in the past tended to the ele- 
 vation of mankind, and the installation in place 
 thereof of a system of thorough dishonesty, 
 emphasized by brutal stupidity. There is a low 
 cunning about it, too, which is to me in the last 
 degree repulsive. 
 
 Low Cunning — that is the twin of Cruelty 
 in the Prussianized German nature. There is 
 a cunning — that of the politicians of the 
 Renaissance, for instance, or that generated 
 by ecclesiasticism — which implies that its 
 adepts have passed over the crest of civiliza- 
 tion and are sinking into decline. Their souls 
 being dead, they go on living by their wits. 
 Instead of wisdom they practice worldly 
 wisdom. It is diamond cut diamond among 
 them. 
 
 In contrast with this civilized cunning 
 stands that of the savage or the barbarian. 
 We know it by its crudeness, its naivete, its 
 inherent inefficiency. The barbarian who re- 
 
MENDACITY 165 
 
 sorts to it half suspects that it does not fool 
 his enemy; but he cannot discover why it 
 fails, and he lacks skill or sophistication to 
 devise something subtle that will work. The 
 German nature has never been subtle, and 
 Kultur, by reducing the Prussianized Ger- 
 mans to a condition of self-centred isolation, 
 in which they could not penetrate the mo- 
 tives and ideals of other races, limited them 
 to a barbarian cunning. To the weak and 
 timid, lying serves as a sort of protective 
 coloration. But the Prussianized Germans, 
 with eight million soldiers under arms, were 
 neither, and they employed mendacity bluntly 
 as a weapon for overcoming neutrals whom 
 they could not bombard into silence or as- 
 phyxiate by poisonous gases. To devise a 
 thoroughly successful lie, however, calls for 
 talent of a very different order from that 
 which fabricates Krupp's howitzers. 
 
 The parent German lie from which the 
 others sprang was, as we have seen, the dec- 
 laration that the Allies attacked Germany 
 
i66 GERMANY vs. CIVILIZATION 
 
 intending to destroy her, and so forced her to 
 act on the defensive, as she was notoriously- 
 opposed to war. What is the truth as the 
 documents have shown it? It is, first, that 
 Austria mobilized her army against Serbia 
 before Russia began to mobilize her South- 
 eastern Army Corps; next, that Germany 
 threatened Russia with war unless she de- 
 mobilized ; thirdly, that the Czar pledged him- 
 self to commit no hostile act until time should 
 be allowed for a conference of the Powers on 
 the Austro-Serb quarrel ; but, finally, that the 
 German Emperor refused to consent to any 
 delay, and declared war on Russia. 
 
 Even more monstrous is the German as- 
 sertion that the Western Powers were the 
 aggressors. A nation which premeditates war 
 on a neighbor makes ready before it strikes. 
 France in July, 1914, was not only unpre- 
 pared to attack Germany, but to defend her- 
 self against attack. If, as the Germans allege, 
 she had agreed with Belgium to make a sud- 
 den invasion into Germany, how did it hap- 
 
MENDACITY 167 
 
 pen that, when the German thunderboh fell, 
 France had no troops in place to give Belgium 
 immediate succor? How did it happen that, 
 on the contrary, French troops were so back- 
 ward that they could not come up in time 
 to give really valid assistance before Eastern 
 Belgium was lost? In Lorraine and in the 
 Vosges — where large bodies of French troops 
 were always stationed — they did check the 
 German onslaught; but when they needed 
 reserves, they had to wait for them during 
 terribly critical days — waiting which would 
 not have been necessary if the French Army 
 had been prepared. A nation which starts a 
 vast aggressive war without looking to its 
 supply of ammunition is crazy. The supply 
 of the French gave out within a month, and 
 they were thereby prevented from forcing 
 the Germans, who were in full retreat from 
 the Marne, straight back to their frontier. 
 This lack it was which enabled the Germans 
 to entrench along the Aisne and in the Ar- 
 gonne. The pretense that the French armies 
 
i68 GERMANY vs. CIVILIZATION 
 
 were straining at the leash to attack Ger- 
 many is utterly false. An aggressor who 
 counts on surprising his antagonist does not 
 withdraw his army six miles behind his own 
 frontier and wait for the antagonist to begin. 
 France did that in the vain hope of preserving 
 peace. 
 
 Still more preposterous is the German in- 
 sinuation that England was the ringleader of 
 the Allies in their plot to overthrow Germany. 
 For some five centuries at least the English 
 have been proficient in figures, and we may 
 safely affirm that, in all their computations, 
 they have never discovered that one hun- 
 dred and sixty thousand equal eight millions. 
 Yet that was the disproportion between the 
 immediately available English troops and 
 the German, when Emperor William entered 
 upon his specious "aggressive-defensive" war. 
 True, the British Navy had just completed its 
 annual manoeuvres, but these were no more 
 intended as a threat against Germany than 
 the annual field exercises of the German Army 
 
MENDACITY 169 
 
 had been a direct challenge to Russia or to 
 France. In his wildest fit of megalomania, 
 John Bull would never have boasted that one 
 British soldier was a match for fifty Germans; 
 and yet this is what the Germans attribute 
 to him when they allege that he forced the 
 struggle upon them. 
 
 The sequence of events which we have 
 traced shows that England actually waited 
 until the Germans had invaded Belgium and 
 France before deciding to fight, and that then 
 her preparations for sending troops across 
 the Channel were so inadequate that her ex- 
 pedition could not check the Germans in Bel- 
 gium and reached France only in time to take 
 part in the great retreat. The Kaiser cor- 
 rectly described her eighty thousand men on 
 the Continent as a "contemptible little army," 
 for he reckoned by millions. These facts dis- 
 pose of the charge that England either made 
 or planned an aggressive war against Ger- 
 many. Even her mighty Navy did not at 
 once take the offensive. 
 
lyo GERMANY vs. CIVILIZATION 
 
 German mendacity has exhausted its in- 
 genuity in inventing pretexts for the violation 
 of Belgium. Of these the most characteristic 
 is that, as Belgium was about to attack Ger- 
 many, Germany was forced in self-defense to 
 attack her first. This is as if a giant ruf- 
 fian, bent on killing and robbing a neighbor, 
 should start to cross an intervening lot, and 
 the owner of that lot, a frail young woman, 
 should refuse him passage, whereupon he out- 
 raged her, and went on his murderous way. 
 And when people cried out in horror at his 
 brutality, he retorted that he acted in self- 
 defense, as the frail young woman was about 
 to outrage him. German apologists for the 
 devastation of Belgium illustrate what I mean 
 when I say that German mendacity bears 
 witness to the insoluble barbaric residue in 
 the German nature. Bethmann-HoUweg's first 
 avowal that "necessity'' forced them to in- 
 vade Belgium, and that it was wrong, cannot 
 be explained away. The future student who 
 tabulates the score or more of "justifications," 
 
MENDACITY 171 
 
 some official, some private, all mutually 
 contradictory, which German defenders have 
 since devised, will assemble an unparalleled 
 exhibit of abortive casuistry. 
 
 I leave unnoticed the mendacity manu- 
 factured for home consumption by the offi- 
 cial organs. That is a form of deception prac- 
 ticed by all governments in war-time, and it 
 seems to succeed in proportion to the inabil- 
 ity of the people to think for themselves. 
 What shall we infer as to the intelligence of 
 German troops who were told on reaching 
 Brussels that they were in Paris.? How shall 
 we estimate the credulity of the German pub- 
 lic which was informed that the Kaiser and 
 his Army had taken Paris, but had refused 
 to enter it in order to escape the typhus fever 
 and cholera which raged there ? In any other 
 country but Germany we should suspect that 
 the official purveyors of mendacity rated their 
 countrymen's gullibility very high. 
 
CHAPTER XII 
 
 THE PLOT TO GERMANIZE AMERICA 
 
 A Countryman returning home one winter's day, found 
 a Snake by the hedge-side, half dead with cold. Taking 
 compassion on the creature, he laid it in his bosom and 
 brought it home to his fireside to revive it. No sooner had 
 the warmth restored it, than it began to attack the chil- 
 dren of the cottage. Upon this the Countryman, whose 
 compassion had saved its life, took up a mattock and laid 
 the Snake dead at his feet. — Those who return evil for 
 good, may expect their neighbor's pity to be worn out at 
 last. 
 
 JEso'p's Fables. 
 
 WE Americans have other means by 
 which to treat German proficiency 
 in the art of deception; for when we raised 
 a cry of indignation over the "scrap of paper" 
 crime, and then a cry of horror over the 
 atrocities in Belgium, the German Govern- 
 ment dispatched to this country a squad of 
 apologists and plotters, who, in collusion with 
 Germans already here, conducted such a 
 campaign as has never been seen before — a 
 
GERMANIZING AMERICA 173 
 
 campaign which on its criminal side would 
 not have been tolerated by an Administra- 
 tion which had possessed either courage or 
 regard for American honor. Only once be- 
 fore in the history of this Republic had its 
 President stood by while those who were 
 plotting its subversion worked unchecked; 
 that President was James Buchanan. 
 
 It soon became evident that the German 
 propagandists were plotting for something 
 much more tangible than America's "moral" 
 sympathy. They addressed us first in the 
 tone of one whose feelings have been hurt by 
 the unexpected coolness of a "dear friend"; 
 but when they found that their explanations 
 did not move us, they resumed their natural 
 Prussian voice, rough, truculent, and defiant. 
 They told us that we were not a nation, but 
 a mob, at the mercy of the mob spirit, which 
 was then controlled by British lies. They 
 warned us that William II would lose no time 
 in punishing us after he had vanquished the 
 Allies. They argued very little, supposing 
 
174 GERMANY vs. CIVILIZATION 
 
 that unsupported assertions or flat denials 
 were more effective. They resorted freely 
 to their characteristic method of attributing 
 to others baseness which they themselves 
 practiced. The hirelings of their reptile press, 
 for instance, charged the great American 
 newspapers with being controlled by "Brit- 
 ish gold," and the subsidized spokesmen of 
 the Kaiser insinuated that our public leaders 
 were under British influence. 
 
 Even in that crisis, involving the future of 
 civilized man on this earth, one could not help 
 smiling at the ludicrous efforts of the Prus- 
 sianized spellbinders to coax the Americans 
 to their cause. They repelled the charge that 
 Germany had rather a scant allowance of 
 freedom, by asserting that, on the contrary, 
 the Germans exercised a much ampler elec- 
 tive right than did the British or the Amer- 
 icans. The Kaiser, they declared, instead of 
 being an autocrat, enjoyed less authority than^ 
 the President of the United States. The 
 charge that Militarism dominated the Father- 
 
GERMANIZING AMERICA 175 
 
 land was a calumny; nothing more Demo- 
 cratic could be imagined than the German 
 military system. Equally baseless were hos- 
 tile references to Junkerism : there had been 
 a time when perhaps the Junkers exerted a 
 trifling influence on Prussia, but, like the 
 dodo, the Junker was now an extinct spe- 
 cies. 
 
 Equally false, maliciously false, was the 
 impression common in America that the Ho- 
 henzollern had been an ambitious dynasty, 
 warlike, cruel towards victims too weak to de- 
 fend themselves, perfidious, and unscrupulous. 
 Most diligent were the Kaiser's paid apolo- 
 gists in drawing a portrait of him that would 
 fascinate Americans. They glossed over his 
 bellicose speeches; they interpreted his fond- 
 ness for rattling the scabbard as playfulness. 
 A hater of England, he? Why, he wore Eng- 
 lish tennis flannels, and prided himself on 
 equaling the English at yachting. As we fol- 
 lowed their descriptions of him, his glistening 
 helmet and military uniform, and sword and 
 
176 GERMANY vs. CIVILIZATION 
 
 spurs, and even his boar*s-tush mustaches 
 dropped away, and he stood there in a gray- 
 Quaker suit and broad-brimmed hat, the 
 reincarnation of William Penn, with the con- 
 ventional smile playing round his lips. 
 
 Such propaganda could originate only in 
 minds which took it for granted that Ameri- 
 cans of intelligence — if there were any — 
 knew nothing about German history, politics, 
 or conditions, and that all other Americans 
 believed what they were told, just as if they 
 were Germans. The propagandists dimly per- 
 ceived that the methods, which worked to 
 perfection at home, were ineffectual here ; but 
 instead of changing their tactics, they con- 
 tinued to use them with redoubled vigor. 
 Their motto was: "If a bad lie does not suc- 
 ceed, reinforce it by a worse." 
 
 Dr. Dernburg, whose aptitudes commended 
 him to the Kaiser, came over as the special 
 Imperial envoy to cajole the Americans; 
 and for half a year the competition be- 
 tween him and Ambassador Bernstorff at 
 
GERMANIZING AMERICA 177 
 
 Washington produced utterances hitherto 
 unmatched on this side of the water. Dr. 
 Dernburg's forte lay in misquoting or in 
 garbling documents, which he would then 
 discuss with an assumed judicial air, and draw 
 from their mutilated remains conclusions 
 opposite from those which their authors in- 
 tended. And when his ruse was exposed,^ he 
 went on brazenly repeating it, as if he were 
 confident that those who listened to him had 
 no flair for truth. Where he did not falsify, 
 as in his quotations from Gladstone, he spun 
 specious arguments like those against British 
 Navalism, or those intended to justify Ger- 
 man violations of law and humanity. To his 
 highly Kultured moral sense, the Lusitania 
 massacre brought reassuring proof that Gott 
 still blessed the Teutonic enterprise. Am- 
 bassador BemstorfFs exploits need not be 
 rehearsed here. It is only fair, however, to 
 
 * See the exposure of him in the New York Sunday 
 Times by Miss Agnes Repplier and Dr. J. W. White. 
 Reprinted as a pamphlet. 
 
1 78 GERMANY vs. CIVILIZATION 
 
 quote from an interview which he gave to the 
 press on August 31, 1914 — mark the date: — 
 
 1. The war is won. The coalition has been 
 defeated in Western Europe. German defeat 
 on land is now out of the question. 
 
 2. The aims of the German General Staff 
 have been attained. The Allies have been so 
 badly and so suddenly worsted that Germany is 
 free to withdraw, as she has begun to do, great 
 numbers of men to ward off the Russian inva- 
 sion.^ 
 
 Y Many other accredited agents of the Kaiser 
 
 would deserve mention in a thorough study 
 of the apostles of Kultur in America, men 
 chosen because they best represented their 
 Imperial master; but I pass over here the 
 experts of the "reptile press," the renegade 
 Jews, the paid hack-writers, the official bu- 
 reaucrats and spies, and mention only the 
 professors. Some of these had been planted 
 in the United States a good while before; 
 . others were sent over to do special work. A 
 world-authority on the altruistic emotions 
 
 * Boston Herald, September i, 1914. 
 
GERMANIZING AMERICA 179 
 
 of the caterpillar, let us say, would pull 
 the wires to be invited to lecture at one of 
 our universities; and when he addressed his 
 American audience, hungry for entomological 
 information, he cruelly abandoned the cater- 
 pillar and poured forth a pro-German appeal. 
 The crudeness of this trick also suggests the 
 barbarian, and its employer doubtless won- 
 dered why he could not keep on fooling Amer- 
 icans with so primitive a device. But there 
 were professors of other kinds. One ex- 
 pounded the ethics of Kultur; another was 
 sly and casuistical; a third frankly berated 
 Americans. There were even spurious pro- 
 fessors and shady missionaries of Prussianism 
 who for excellent reasons adopted aliases. 
 
 Before this campaign had been long under 
 way, it became evident that the Kaiser's 
 agents had a double purpose. They worked 
 not only to propitiate American public opin- 
 ion, in the hope that it would voluntarily es- 
 pouse the German cause, but also to organ- 
 ize the German-Americans in this country 
 
i8o GERMANY vs. CIVILIZATION 
 
 into a compact political party, which should 
 terrorize, if it could not persuade the Gov- 
 ernment to aid Germany by direct or indirect 
 means. As time went on, these conpirators 
 grew brazen. They held meetings at which 
 they openly preached sedition, and through the 
 press they announced that they and the Irish- 
 Americans would seize control of the country 
 and rule it for the benefit of the HohenzoUern 
 dynasty. Some of the most exuberant of them 
 seem to have had a vision of a German Im- 
 perial Prince, sitting in the White House as 
 Viceroy of the Kaiser. 
 
 Few flights of the imagination could be 
 more comical than that which suggests that 
 the Irish-Americans should unite with the 
 Germans in a league to be dominated by 
 the Germans. The Irish, who have often de- 
 clared the somewhat slack rule of the Eng- 
 lish in Ireland too exasperating to be borne, 
 would hardly find the strait-jacket regime 
 of Prussia comfortable: and with their native 
 talent for politics, which has given them power, 
 
GERMANIZING AMERICA 181 
 
 local and national, out of all proportion to 
 their numbers, they are not likely to abdicate 
 in favor of the German-Americans, who have 
 shown comparatively little ability as prac- 
 tical politicians. The Germans in Tammany 
 Hall are controlled by' the Irish; and that 
 will be the relative position of the two races 
 whatever be the terms of their alliance. Ger- 
 man conspirators here, who flatter them- 
 selves that the Irish will sacrifice their posi- 
 tion in America in order to promote the 
 ambition of a Prussian or any other monarch 
 in Europe, are hopelessly dense, and at the 
 end of the bargain they will perceive that 
 the Irish have exploited them for their own 
 purposes here. The Irish intend to remain 
 Americans. 
 
 The Kaiser's agents did not stop at openly 
 preaching sedition. They spread secretly a 
 network of violence such as has never before 
 been attempted by aliens in a foreign coun- 
 try — a conspiracy all the more monstrous 
 because Germany was officially at peace with 
 
i82 GERMANY vs. CIVILIZATION 
 
 the United States and pretended to desire 
 American good-will. Acting under instruc- 
 tions which were traced to German and Aus- 
 trian officials, the Teutonic miscreants placed 
 bombs on outgoing steamers, blew up muni- 
 tions factories, resorted to the intimidation 
 of capitalists, organized strikes and sabotage, 
 tried to wreck railroads, and made this coun- 
 try a base for hostile operations against the 
 Allies with whom we were at peace. 
 
 For effrontery these proceedings have had 
 no precedent here. Reverse the positions of 
 the nations, and suppose that Americans, 
 being engaged in a war with England, should 
 carry on a similar campaign of mendacity and 
 crime inside Germany, which was neutral. 
 The German Government would suppress such 
 conspirators within a week, and it would give 
 short shrift to gentlemen who announced that 
 they were going to take possession of Ger- 
 many and to run it thereafter as an Ameri- 
 can province. In the United States, even 
 sedition is allowed free speech; but, if the 
 
GERMANIZING AMERICA 183 
 
 Administration at Washington had not been 
 both supine and self-seeking, it would have 
 acted so decisively that the Teutonic con- 
 spirators would have been promptly checked. 
 It remained for President Wilson to announce 
 to Congress that as a result of fifteen months' 
 non-interference on his part there had grown 
 up a formidable body of sedition, composed 
 of persons whom he omitted to designate. 
 
 Examples abound of the low cunning in 
 which Germans put their trust. When they 
 perceived that their direct assault on Ameri- 
 can public opinion made no headway, they 
 discarded the hyphen and the name "Ger- 
 man,'' and formed organizations to uphold 
 "American" truth, "American" interests, 
 "American" national ideals, or "American" 
 neutrality; so rogues ply their trade under 
 assumed names. 
 
 Two manifestations of Kulturized craft 
 ought not to be passed over. When the Brit- 
 ish blockade succeeded in cutting off most of 
 Germany's food supplies by sea, the Teutons 
 
i84 GERMANY vs. CIVILIZATION 
 
 set up a whimper over the cruelty of starv- 
 ing to death the women and children of an 
 entire nation. Coming from them, whose 
 home government, after wrecking Belgium, 
 left the Belgians to starve, this plea for 
 humanity was peculiarly indecent. Hohen- 
 zollern Frightfulness towards the Belgians 
 caused humane persons throughout the world 
 to contribute at the rate of fifty million dollars 
 a year to clothe and feed those victims for 
 whose maintenance the Germans themselves 
 were responsible. What part of the supplies 
 the Germans diverted, we shall probably 
 never know; but we see how they used the 
 desperate sufferings of the Belgians as a de- 
 vice for saving four or five million dollars a 
 month for the benefit of their own Army. 
 The whimper of the Kaiser's agents in the 
 United States was all the more nauseating, 
 because at the very time when we were be- 
 sought to relieve the women and children of 
 Germany from famine, the German Chancel- 
 lor and other high spokesmen of the Empire 
 
GERMANIZING AMERICA 185 
 
 kept declaring that there was a superabun- 
 dance of food, and that Germany could never 
 be starved out. Who lied ? 
 
 During the American Civil War, while the 
 Union forces were slowly exhausting the Con- 
 federacy by constriction, there was no talk 
 of allowing the British or French to send food 
 to the Southern women and children ; and in 
 1870, after the Prussians, having hemmed in 
 Paris, proceeded to starve it out, they would 
 have guffawed at the suggestion that they 
 should let supplies for the famished Parisians 
 pass. They knew that every hungry mouth 
 diminished the dwindling store of provisions, 
 and that every empty stomach lessened the 
 power of resistance. But when the tables were 
 turned, if they were turned, — and we have 
 the Chancellor's word for it, that there was 
 no lack of food, — the Germans whined that 
 they must be spared the effects of a block- 
 ade, although they themselves and all other 
 Western nations had used blockades as a legiti- 
 mate form of warfare. 
 
i86 GERMANY vs. CIVILIZATION 
 
 Similarly hypocritical was their campaign 
 against the shipment of munitions to the Al- 
 lies. The right of the merchants of a neutral 
 country to sell goods to belligerents was rec- 
 ognized long ago in international law. The 
 Germans have always exercised it ; impartially, 
 too, if it be true that they sold guns and mu- 
 nitions to both Russia and Japan in the war 
 of 1904-05. Just before the outbreak of the 
 Atrocious War, they were sending shiploads 
 of arms to the Mexican revolutionists, who, 
 they hoped, would involve us in their strug- 
 gle and so prevent us from interfering in 
 Europe. With equal impartiality they sold 
 their wares to Turks and to some of the Bal- 
 kan Christians up to 191 2. Krupp's agents 
 never inquired into the race, creed, or politics 
 of a good customer. If the Kaiser himself was 
 a stockholder in the Krupp Company, he had 
 no reason to be dissatisfied with the dividends 
 it paid him; but when, through his inability 
 to keep a single ship, naval or mercantile, on 
 the sea, he could not transport American 
 
GERMANIZING AMERICA 187 
 
 munitions to Germany, his lobby at Wash- 
 ington and his agents throughout the United 
 States started an agitation for an embargo. 
 These conspirators found a certain number 
 of disloyal public men in Congress, and senti- 
 mentalists who mistake the shadow for the 
 substance and love to be duped, to join them 
 in an attempt which, if it were successful, 
 would violate American neutrality, flout in- 
 ternational law, and be an admission that a 
 foreign monarch controls the lawmaking of 
 this nation. 
 
 Germany practiced a peculiarly ignoble 
 form of deceit in permitting her subjects who 
 came to this country to become naturalized 
 American citizens, with the tacit understand- 
 ing that, when they returned home, they 
 might resume their German citizenship. The 
 purpose of this double shuffle was evident 
 as soon as the war broke out. Germans who 
 had resided here for years, never hinting that 
 they wished to become Americans, suddenly 
 applied for naturalization papers, and were 
 
i88 GERMANY vs. CIVILIZATION 
 
 soon presiding at pro-German meetings or 
 editing pro-German journals, and setting 
 themselves up as expounders of the American- 
 ism of Washington and Lincoln. One hardly 
 knows which to despise more, the deceit or 
 the impudence. 
 
 The final revelation as to Prussianized 
 Germany came when the world realized the 
 almost limitless extension of the German spy 
 system. The spy, as trained and employed 
 by Germany, is the meanest of creatures. It 
 would be a libel on the microbes of an infec- 
 tious disease to compare him to them. They 
 do their work as all inanimate matter does; 
 but he is a sentient being with a perverted will, 
 who simulates the truth which his heart is 
 incapable of feeling, and dissimulates the 
 falsehood which is his second nature, in order 
 to prepare the ruin of the unsuspecting per- 
 sons among whom he glides. The German 
 Government kept spies in every court; it 
 planted them in foreign corporations; it used 
 them to trail the intentions of other govern- 
 
GERMANIZING AMERICA 189 
 
 ments and of politicians; it insinuated them 
 into laboratories and mills. They intrigued in 
 Egypt and in India and in South Africa to 
 foment risings against the English; they in- 
 fluenced the Japanese against America; they 
 laid the train in Mexico for an explosion 
 against this country; their burrowing in the 
 Far East is known. Other nations — Russia, 
 for instance, and Austria — have practiced 
 espionage for centuries, but never on such a 
 scale or with such diabolical cynicism or with 
 such precision. Neither has any other nation 
 found it so easy to persuade those of its citi- 
 zens who settled abroad to consent to serve 
 as non-commissioned supporters of the sys- 
 tem. The Germans who for business or pleas- 
 ure resided in Eastern France or in Paris ; the 
 German colonists who filtered into Western 
 Poland; those who overran Italy and Eng- 
 land, and their counterparts everywhere, had 
 among them many who played with equal 
 ease the roles of propagandist and of spy. 
 German missionaries, sent out to teach the 
 
190 GERMANY vs. CIVILIZATION 
 
 heathen the reHgion of Gott, are ready agents 
 of the German Secret Service Bureau. 
 
 In these various shapes Mendacity, which 
 seems to be an indestructible element of the 
 German nature, displays itself. The ominous 
 fact is not that some Germans should lie or 
 deceive or accept the spies' loathsome com- 
 missions — the wicked and the vile are found 
 in every race; the ominous fact is, not only 
 that the Prussianized German Government, 
 having elaborated Mendacity as carefully as 
 they perfected their Militarism, should find 
 multitudes eager to practice it, but also that 
 the German people, north, south, east, and 
 west, should regard it as the most natural 
 thing in life. 
 
 Is it not significant that Goethe, who was 
 as far removed as possible from Prussian 
 ideals, should embody in Mephistopheles — 
 the Spirit of Falseness — this deep-seated 
 national characteristic.'' The substance of his 
 Mephistopheles was Pan-German and might 
 be supplied today by the Kaiser and his 
 
GERMANIZING AMERICA 191 
 
 Ring; but Goethe himself supplied the keen 
 edge and devilish sarcasm which make Meph- 
 istopheles the one unapproached creation in 
 German dramatic literature. 
 
 Cruelty and Cunning — those are the ends 
 to which Kultur logically leads : and of these 
 the more hideous is Cunning. Cruelty denies 
 the human bond which links every man to 
 the race; but Cunning, Mendacity, denies 
 Truth itself. Cruelty may burst out in an 
 excess of passion and may be expiated by 
 remorse, so far as there is any expiation for 
 guilt whose victims perish. But Cunning is 
 premeditated, merciless, too hardened to be 
 capable of remorse. Dante, the terrible ap- 
 praiser of guilt, reserved the lowest depths 
 of hell for the Fraudulent — those who by 
 Mendacity betrayed their fellow men. 
 
 That these conspirators have acted in ruth- 
 less disregard of the many Germans in the 
 United States who abhor Prussianism and 
 wish to stand loyally by this country and its 
 institutions, was to be expected; for every 
 
192 GERMANY vs. CIVILIZATION 
 
 German in America who prefers America to 
 Germany is a refutation of the claims of Dr. 
 Dernburg and all the other propagandists 
 of Kultur. Quite naturally, these victims of 
 persecution and intimidation have kept si- 
 lent ; no census has been made of them ; and 
 the seditious have not hesitated to assert 
 that all German-Americans are behind their 
 conspiracy. When the "show-down" comes, 
 there will be a tragic surprise for those 
 who have been banking on the disloyalty of 
 any large number of persons in the United 
 States. 
 
 But Kultur employs a logic of its own, 
 which results in what to non-Germans are 
 contradictions stupefyingly bizarre. I have 
 given two or three specimens of these al- 
 ready, but there is another which the stu- 
 dent of Teutonic psychology ought not to 
 overlook. 
 
 For a dozen years past the zealots of Kul- 
 tur have told us that Germany surpasses 
 other countries, not only in its powerful mili- 
 
GERMANIZING AMERICA 193 
 
 tary organization, but in every walk of life. 
 Every German is instructed precisely what 
 he must do, and he does it thoroughly. The 
 Government directs both his labors and his 
 pleasures; it saves him in a thousand cases 
 from the necessity of deciding for himself; it 
 leaves nothing or almost nothing to his indi- 
 vidual initiative; it watches over every class, 
 and each unit in every class; it banishes pov- 
 erty; it assures Germans of a stipend in their 
 old age; it allows them to explore vast laby- 
 rinths of erudition; it offers them books, mu- 
 sic, art, in heaping measure : and in return for 
 all this, it exacts only obedience, that virtue 
 from exercising which a German is supposed to 
 derive as much pleasure as other persons de- 
 rive from love. So Germany is, on the avowal 
 of its own officials, the Earthly Paradise, 
 dreamt of for ages and yearned for by sorely 
 tried men and women of all races, and now at 
 last put into happy operation by the wizards 
 of Kultur. 
 
 But what strange fact is this which shat- 
 
194 GERMANY vs, CIVILIZATION 
 
 ters our alluring vision of the Earthly Para- 
 dise ? Why is it that emigrants east and west, 
 north and south, discontented or downtrod- 
 den at home, do not flock thither in their 
 search of happier conditions? Norwegians, 
 Swedes, and Finns need only to cross the 
 Baltic in order to reach the Happy Land ; but 
 instead, they voyage over the sundering Atlan- 
 tic to the United States. One would imagine 
 that the magnetic attraction would be so 
 strong on Danes and Dutchmen that they 
 would wipe out their frontiers and beg to be 
 merged in the German Eden. Why are the 
 Italians, rather a quick-witted people, so 
 dull as to travel to America, where too often 
 grinding toil and a precarious existence await 
 them, when a day's journey would bring them 
 into the Kaiser's Empire? And so of Slavs 
 and Bulgars and Greeks and Syrians and 
 Armenians, of Letts also and Magyars and 
 mishandled Jews everywhere — why do not 
 they lay down their burdens and become 
 residents of this Prussianized Utopia ? 
 
GERMANIZING AMERICA 195 
 
 More than twoscore years ago, in the kind- 
 ness of their hearts the Germans insisted that 
 the inhabitants of Alsace and Lorraine should 
 share German hospitahty. They argued that 
 these people, having once been German, must 
 quickly feel at home, like exiles after a long 
 absence. Why is it, then, that they remain 
 French, loathing everything German, refusing 
 to see in the treatment they have had, or in 
 the German ideals behind that treatment, the 
 slightest resemblance to Paradise? Must we 
 conclude that this German Happy Land is 
 happy only for the Germans themselves, as 
 the wasp's nest, made with much delicate 
 precision and such perfect efficiency, is home 
 only to wasps ? And what is this dark fact, 
 attested every year by the statisticians ? The 
 number of child suicides in Germany far ex- 
 ceeds, per capita, that in any other country. 
 The Kingdom of Heaven is peopled with chil- 
 dren. Can it be that a brief experience re- 
 veals to German children that Germany is 
 not Heaven ? 
 
196 GERMANY vs. CIVILIZATION 
 
 What becomes of Kultur as a universal sys- 
 tem, if this be true ? And what shall we say 
 of the Kaiser's propagandists in the United 
 States, who openly proclaim that they mean 
 to Germanize this nation? Can we suppose 
 that the millions of descendants of those who 
 founded this country on principles which are 
 the negation of Prussian Kultur, will abjure 
 their faith? Or that the other millions who 
 fled from Continental Europe to enjoy here 
 opportunities and institutions denied them 
 there, will meekly consent to live under Ger- 
 man domination? Will the Germans them- 
 selves who have settled here and prospered 
 and stubbornly refused to go home to the 
 Fatherland, masquerading as Utopia — will 
 they join in the conspiracy to destroy this 
 Republic to which they or their fathers 
 voluntarily escaped as to a place of salva- 
 tion? The paid agents of the Kaiser we un- 
 derstand, but we believe that they do not 
 represent the great body of the German im- 
 migration. 
 
GERMANIZING AMERICA 197 
 
 A child of ordinary intelligence could hardly 
 fail to ask, after being told of the perfec- 
 tion of Germany and the irresistible attraction 
 of the Fatherland for Germans, Why is it that 
 the Germans do not go home and stay ? Many 
 of them have grown rich in this country, and 
 they would be able to secure luxury in Ger- 
 many, where wealth is not less potent than 
 it is here; but neither rich nor poor go back. 
 Is it from pure altruism that they, who can- 
 not be enticed to return to Germany for good, 
 insist that we and the rest of mankind must 
 be Germanized ? And is honor or logic want- 
 ing in those professors, who, having managed 
 to slide into American university chairs and 
 even to become naturalized citizens, make it 
 their business to depreciate and actually to 
 condemn everything American and to hold 
 up everything German as a model for us to 
 follow? Why do not they go home? 
 
 The paid propagandists of Germany, and 
 her other enthusiastic emigrants in foreign 
 lands, remind us of those suspiciously pious 
 
198 GERMANY vs. CIVILIZATION 
 
 persons who protest at all times that they 
 yearn to go to heaven at once, but take every 
 possible precaution to live on earth as long as 
 they can. 
 
 World-power or downfall! That is the Ger- 
 man motto in the Atrocious War. With what 
 desperation the Kaiser has been seeking vic- 
 tory appears, not less in his cynical disregard 
 of solemn treaties and in the ferocity of his 
 devastation of Belgium, than in the campaign 
 of crime carried on by agents in this country. 
 Only men convinced that they must win, at 
 any cost and by any means, could resort to 
 the terrorist methods which these agents use. 
 But what if the Kaiser does not win? In 
 what state will the hyphenate, seditious Ger- 
 mans here be left.^^ Can they suppose that the 
 Americans, who are and intend to remain 
 Americans, will welcome them as neighbors ? 
 Will the American workmen who have been 
 thrown out of employment by the blowing- 
 up of their factories feel kindly towards the 
 Teutons who committed these crimes.'* Will 
 
GERMANIZING AMERICA 199 
 
 American business men, whose legitimate 
 business and investments have been blocked 
 by German capitalists, cherish no resentment ? 
 Will American universities tolerate profes- 
 sors who have been slyly preaching sedition? 
 It is far more likely that for a generation to 
 come the very word "German'' will be de- 
 tested in the United States and that every 
 German will have to show cause why he 
 should not be regarded as a secret enemy of 
 this country. The survivors and descendants 
 of those who are now abetting the conspiracy 
 against the United States in behalf of a for- 
 eign Power will be as eager as were the Cop- 
 perheads after the Civil War to have their 
 past forgotten. The hyphens will fall: the 
 citizens of this country will be Americans 
 and nothing else; there will be no mongrel 
 citizenship to be used as a mask for treason. 
 The plotters against the United States, and 
 their accomplices, native or foreign, make 
 the fatal mistake of supposing that Ameri- 
 cans will long tolerate in the White House 
 
200 GERMANY vs. CIVILIZATION 
 
 a President who lacks courage. Courage and 
 Honesty are the two quaUties which, in the 
 long run, they set most store by in their 
 Presidents. Tragic would be the occasion if 
 hostile critics identified Cowardice and Dis- 
 honesty. 
 
CHAPTER XIII 
 
 THE SHIPWRECK OF KULTUR 
 
 Wherever Germany extends her sway, she ruins Culture. 
 
 Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, p. 38. 
 Culture and the State are antagonists: a " Culture-State" 
 is merely a modern idea. The one lives upon the other, 
 the one flourishes at the expense of the other. ... In the 
 history of European Culture the rise of the [German] 
 Empire signifies, above all, a displacement of the centre of 
 gravity. Everywhere people are already aware of this: in 
 things that really matter — and these after all constitute 
 Culture — the Germans are no longer worth considering. 
 The Tzvilight of the Idols, p. 54. 
 Every great crime against Culture for the last four cen- 
 turies lies upon their [the German] conscience. 
 
 Ecce Homo J p. 124. 
 
 MAN Started among the beasts in whose 
 struggle for existence there is the 
 unending play and counterplay between brute 
 force and cunning. Man became Man by 
 sloughing ofiF the qualities which chain the 
 Beast forever to the Beasts' level. Meas- 
 uring by geological ages we see him emerge 
 with incredible slowness from Beast-hood into 
 Man-hood; and so up through Savagery and 
 
202 GERMANY vs. CIVILIZATION 
 
 Barbarism, till he stands erect on the lowest 
 step of Civilization; and then he mounts, still 
 with groping hesitation, with frequent pauses, 
 and with actual backslidings, the ladder of 
 Ideals. Gradually there dawn in him in- 
 stincts, motives, which neither the Beast, the 
 Savage, nor the Barbarian ever knows. These 
 are the stuff through which he discovers that 
 he has a soul, the august and awful inmate of 
 his inmost self. 
 
 Thenceforward Man fares on his journey 
 through life, a strange blend of animal and of 
 spirit — the animal in him always on the 
 alert to regain entire mastery, and the spirit, 
 though often baffled and betrayed, ready to 
 renew its divine mission. This antagonism 
 runs through all human affairs ; and when the 
 earliest moralists looked beneath the surface 
 of life and examined the fortunes and deeds 
 of men, they discerned that this is a moral 
 world in which the forces of good and the 
 forces of evil — God and Devil — battle for- 
 ever for control. Subsequent scrutiny has 
 
THE SHIPWRECK OF KULTUR 203 
 
 always reached the conclusion that the only 
 permanent good is spiritual. Pride of intel- 
 lect, beauty of form and face, the conquests 
 of science over the material world, the tri- 
 umphs of war-lords after great battles won 
 and imperial territories annexed — these are 
 not the true measure of Civilization. True 
 Civilization is of the spirit, whose treasure the 
 world can neither give nor take away. How 
 irrelevant, how external and fleeting in the 
 presence of Emerson is the uncounted lucre of 
 Cecil Rhodes or of Rockefeller! With what 
 scorn would Washington have repelled the 
 suggestion that he should exchange places 
 with Frederick the Great! With what irony 
 would Lincoln have dismissed a proffered 
 exchange with William II! To Washington 
 and Lincoln the possibility of being degraded 
 to the level of Frederick and of William would 
 have been abhorrent. 
 
 So rapid has been Man's subjugation of 
 Nature, and so astounding the inventions by 
 which he has turned her laws into servants of 
 
204 GERMANY vs. CIVILIZATION 
 
 his own will, that it has come to be the fashion 
 to mistake these things for progress. We 
 even hear them bhthely lauded as essentials 
 of Civilization. But Man, and not his tools, 
 makes Civilization, and its character will be 
 either animal or spiritual according to his 
 nature. Ability to shoot up in an express ele- 
 vator to the top of a fifty-story New York 
 sky-scraper, or to motor a hundred miles in 
 an hour, or to telephone across the continent, 
 or to send messages by wireless telegraph, 
 does not constitute Civilization. It took 
 Shakespeare two days to ride on horseback 
 from Stratford to London; has poetry out- 
 soared Shakespeare in these days when one 
 can be whirled from Stratford to London in 
 tw^o hours ? 
 
 Inventions and ideas also bless or curse 
 according to the spirit of their user. Hardly 
 had printing been discovered, to bring incal- 
 culable benefit to mankind, before the Devil 
 saw his profit in it, and he has kept the 
 presses of the world supplied with copy ever 
 
THE SHIPWRECK OF KULTUR 205 
 
 since. The modern probing into Nature has 
 already produced a state of mind in scientific 
 investigators which awakens anxiety as to the 
 source from which their knowledge springs. 
 Many religions have had a foreboding that 
 there dwells something at the heart of the 
 world which should not be unveiled, some 
 primordial terror which, like the Gorgon, 
 blasts those who look upon it. To hide this 
 from the common gaze, mysteries were de- 
 vised which it was sacrilege to attempt to 
 penetrate, and Faith, not Reason, was de- 
 clared the door to the truth that saved. 
 
 Modem Science, inquisitive and resolute, 
 undaunted and tireless, has drilled its shafts 
 of investigation, and has applied its micro- 
 scope and its test-tube throughout the do- 
 main of Matter: and it has found Matter, 
 and more Matter and nothing but Matter, 
 apparently directed by material laws. The 
 dyer's hand is subdued to what it works in. 
 Assuming that there is a spirit in Man, might 
 not that spirit be slowly stifled, materialized, 
 
2o6 GERMANY vs. CIVILIZATION 
 
 and finally extinguished by continuous devo- 
 tion to Matter and material laws? Might it 
 not even come to pass that the worship of 
 these material laws which Science has evoked 
 should undo Man, as Frankenstein was un- 
 done by the monster he created ? What if the 
 Germans — having drawn aside the veil from 
 the last mystery — have seen that Moloch is 
 the Prime Mover of the world ? 
 
 We cannot call material laws merciless, 
 because they proceed from that which feels 
 nothing. So human laws devised by mate- 
 rialists may be logically unfeeling; and the 
 rulers of a people who have accepted the rev- 
 elation that Moloch is God will naturally 
 develop a system patterned after Moloch's 
 commands. Ponder this well. If the Prussian 
 pagan creed is true, then Moloch is God: his 
 orders are the shambles of battlefields; the 
 sacrifices most acceptable to him are the vic- 
 tims of combat and massacre ; the hymns he 
 delights in are the shrieks of ravished women, 
 the pitiful cries of terrified little children, the 
 
THE SHIPWRECK OF KULTUR 207 
 
 mingled groans and curses of wounded and 
 dying soldiers. His high priests are those who 
 lead the teeming miUions to slaughter — At- 
 tila, and Tamerlane, and William II of Hohen- 
 zollern. This is the corner-stone of Kultur, 
 this the infernal abyss into which Kultur has 
 already dragged Germany and would drag 
 mankind. 
 
 Ponder this well. No plea for a place in the 
 sun can justify the cruelty and the cunning 
 which its attaining involves. The pomp of 
 many armies, all marching obedient to the 
 command of Moloch's Vice-Regent, does not 
 hide the butcher's errand on which they 
 speed. The Religion of Valor is a thin dis- 
 guise for brutality, in which Man at the touch 
 of the Devil's wand is metamorphosed back 
 into his Beast Original. Patriotism becomes 
 the disguise under which the primal instincts 
 of tiger and wolf riot unleashed. In Kultur's 
 triumph Civilization dies. 
 
 Kultur is not designed to benefit any other 
 race except the German. If it conquered, it 
 
2o8 GERMANY vs. CIVILIZATION 
 
 would revive the feudal relation of lord and 
 vassal, Germany being the lord and all other 
 peoples being her vassals. Kultur, as we have 
 seen at every point in this survey, permits 
 all things to the Germans. Their religion, 
 their sense of honor and of mercy, their re- 
 spect for common men apply only to them- 
 selves. German truth ceases to be truth when 
 it crosses the frontier. Gott, the German 
 deity, is a tribal god, made in the image of the 
 Germans who created him. 
 
 Shall we marvel most at the patience with 
 which the Teutonic genius has reticulated 
 such a system, or at the overweening conceit 
 with which each Teuton regards himself with 
 supreme satisfaction and Kultur as the per- 
 fect Civilization which must be nailed down 
 and riveted over the rest of the world ^ And 
 what shall we say of a nation which at this 
 late day supposes that any one political sys- 
 tem can be the best for all nations ? If you 
 view mankind as it is, divided into hundreds 
 of varieties, each differing from the others in 
 
THE SHIPWRECK OF KULTUR 209 
 
 traditions, in geographical environment, and 
 in moral and intellectual capacity, you will 
 surely conclude that to attempt to stand- 
 ardize them would be as fatuous as to wrap 
 the earth in a uniform climate. Such fatu- 
 ity is born in the brains of would-be world- 
 conquerors. 
 
 The great and deep and holy things of life 
 do not come by the sword. World-conquerors 
 by Frightfulness may command lip-service; 
 they may batten on the fruits of their vic- 
 tim's labor: but they cannot command re- 
 spect or friendship, loyalty or love. Of all 
 the conquering races, the Prussian has thus 
 far been the least fitted to conciliate the van- 
 quished. After one hundred and forty years 
 Polish Prussia, although it has suffered unin- 
 termitted persecution, remains Polish in de- 
 sires and hopes and still requires to be terri- 
 fied. Forty-five years of Prussian hectoring 
 in Alsace and Lorraine have not diminished 
 by a hair's breadth the French spirit there. 
 In their more recent colonial possessions the 
 
210 GERMANY vs. CIVILIZATION 
 
 Germans have not even pretended to wish to 
 secure the good-will of their subjects, it being 
 a dogma of Kultur that the dark-skinned 
 races are in fact only animals, to be treated as 
 such. 
 
 But above political and military systems, 
 above tribal customs and standards condi- 
 tioned by climate, are a few hallowed prin- 
 ciples which sum up the ideals of civilized 
 men, ideals which even the least civilized 
 have acknowledged, and all have endeavored, 
 according to their varying capacity, to serve. 
 Justice is one of these principles; Freedom 
 is another; Pity, another. 
 
 The State worshiped by the Germans as 
 an abstraction "above Society" is indeed just 
 as personal as was its medieval prototype. 
 But in the Middle Ages, Church and State 
 went together; and the Church, which was the 
 organ of religion, exercised, in theory at least, 
 authority over the State in those matters into 
 which religion or morals entered. But mark 
 well that in the system devised by Kultur, 
 
THE SHIPWRECK OF KULTUR 211 
 
 the State is omnipotent. Kultur recognizes 
 neither morals nor rehgion apart from po- 
 litical considerations. The conscience of the 
 Germans and their public and private acts are 
 in the keeping of this godless abstraction. No 
 wonder that poor old Haeckel shouts out 
 his octogenarian rejoicing that the war has 
 proved that God and immortality are absurd 
 delusions, and that Kultur is the highest 
 achievement of Man. 
 
 I quote from a private letter, written by an 
 eminent physician with the British expedi- 
 tion in France to a distinguished American 
 physician : — 
 
 With all my soul I believe that the Ideal of 
 pity is the noblest thing we have, and that its 
 denial, which waves on every German flag, is 
 the denial of all that the greatest men have 
 striven for for centuries. I see In this war the 
 colossal strife between the doctrine which I call 
 good, and der Geist der stets verneint. You see I 
 am almost borrowing the language of the Kaiser. 
 I feel that the two enormous spirits that move 
 this world are showing their weapons almost 
 visibly, and that never was the garment of the 
 
212 GERMANY vs. CIVILIZATION 
 
 living world so thin over the gods that it con- 
 ceals. 
 
 I am not much elated by the thought. I have 
 little opinion of Providence as an ally. 1 am 
 surprised at the weakness that the Kaiser shows 
 for his pocket Deity. What we have to do in my 
 opinion we do ourselves, and our task is none 
 the lighter that we defend the right. But I am 
 hardened and set by the thing I believe. I and 
 my dear boy ^ talked of it much as I am talking 
 to you, for we were close friends, and we felt, 
 both of us, that we were fighting for the life of 
 England — yes, for the safety of France — yes, 
 for the sanctity of treaties — yes, but, behind 
 these secondary and comparatively material 
 issues, for something far deeper, far greater, for 
 something so great and deep that, if our efforts 
 fail, I pray God I may die before I see it. 
 
 Kultur, which shuts out Justice and Free- 
 dom and Pity, shuts out Chivalry also, which, 
 if it be not fundamental like these three, 
 is the fragrance of the higher Civilization. 
 Saladin, the Arab, had it, in his conflict with 
 the Crusaders. It was the ideal of every 
 worthy knight in Christendom ; it is a second 
 
 ^ The son had recently been killed. 
 
THE SHIPWRECK OF KULTUR 213 
 
 nature to every modern gentleman. Grant 
 had it at Appomattox, when he bade the 
 vanquished officers of the Confederacy to keep 
 their side-arms, and spared them the slight- 
 est suggestion of humiliation. But Chivalry 
 seems to have found no lodgment in Prussia. 
 I recall no generous act of Frederick the 
 Great, or of Bismarck when he imposed terms 
 on fallen France. The Prussian is not satiated 
 by the overthrow of his enemies; he must see 
 them prostrate in the dust and plant his 
 heavy foot upon their necks. 
 
 A nation accessible to Chivalry would 
 neither have ordered the torpedoing of the 
 passenger ship Lusitania filled with noncom- 
 batants, nor have gloated over the crime, 
 holding great meetings for exultation and 
 gathering the children of the Fatherland into 
 theatres and churches to sing hallelujahs over 
 the destruction of those twelve hundred inno- 
 cent souls. I turn away from such barbaric 
 rejoicings to the pictures of the sea strewn 
 with the bodies of drowned babies and of 
 
214 GERMANY vs. CIVILIZATION 
 
 drowned mothers clasping their Httle ones 
 in their arms. Happy those little ones, who 
 could never grow up to have hearts like the 
 Germans, bereft alike of Chivalry and of 
 Pity! Happy, too, those mothers, who dis- 
 played in the swift, final test of life that 
 mother-love which neither Kaiser, Krupp, nor 
 Kultur can vanquish. 
 
 Where was Chivalry when Von Bissing, the 
 Prussian Governor of Belgium, ordered Edith 
 Cavell's execution ? If she had been guilty of 
 the worst crimes imputed to her, she might 
 at least have been put to death with decency. 
 Instead of that, Von Bissing let only a few 
 hours intervene between her condemnation 
 and her being led out at two o'clock in the 
 morning to face the platoon of soldiers. No 
 respite allowed for reviewing the evidence ; no 
 person except the prison chaplain permitted 
 to see her; no friend to take her last message; 
 all hurried, clandestine, ruthless, as if Von 
 Bissing feared that he might be deprived 
 of his victim; he, backed by the ful^power 
 
THE SHIPWRECK OF KULTUR 215 
 
 of Germany; she, one woman alone in an im- 
 pregnable cell, ringed about by a fortress with 
 regiments to defend it. And when they had 
 shot her. Von Hissing's agents, wishing to 
 debase her memory, gave out to the papers 
 that she had quailed and broken down and 
 pleaded for mercy: but the prison chaplain 
 told the truth. Such is Chivalry as practiced 
 by William IFs chosen officers. 
 
 Thus, wherever we test it, Kultur breaks 
 down. It has created a nation which boasts 
 itself superior to the common laws of human- 
 ity; a nation which asserts that Honor and 
 Justice and Truth, that Pity and Chivalry 
 and Self-sacrifice, have no meaning for it in 
 its dealings with the whole world outside. It 
 might as well assert that the law of gravity 
 or the formulas of algebra applicable else- 
 where ceased to operate on German soil. 
 Kultur, proclaimed by the Germans as a sys- 
 tem which will overspread the earth, is in 
 reality not universal, but local, tribal, nar- 
 rowing. No modern race except the Germans 
 
2i6 GERMANY us. CIVILIZATION 
 
 could have invented it; so only Germans can 
 both use it and glory in its use. It is like the 
 harness of steel and straps which a cripple has 
 to wear: by practice he learns to move about 
 in it with ease; but though he be a giant, he 
 is none the less a cripple, and the steel and 
 straps are none the less a harness. 
 
 "But what!" you ask; *'has not Kultur 
 produced the highest efficiency ever known 
 to man.? Has it not trained sixty millions to 
 such mechanical skill and mental docility that 
 at a signal from Berlin they all turn east and 
 bow in unison, and at another signal they all 
 turn west.? Has not Kultur created an army 
 so perfect that its units and individuals could 
 hardly be more machine-like if they were 
 actually cogs and bolts of iron ? Has not Kul- 
 tur resulted in a system of education which 
 directs every German at every moment of 
 his life from the day he enters the Kinder- 
 garten to the day when he becomes a doctor 
 of philosophy.? Has not Kultur applied sci- 
 ence to industry and to commerce as well as 
 
THE SHIPWRECK OF KULTUR 217 
 
 to the most trifling daily needs? Has it not 
 subjected religion and philosophy, poetry, 
 history, and letters, to the microscope of crit- 
 icism? Has any other system imposed an 
 equally rigid discipline or been rewarded by 
 an equally submissive obedience ? " 
 
 To all these questions there is but one 
 answer: Kultur has achieved this, and the 
 achievement marks at once the glory and 
 shipwreck of Kultur. The object of every 
 beneficent teaching is to take even human 
 clods and evoke the souls latent in them; 
 Kultur takes Germans and reduces them to 
 the state of soulless machines. EflSciency is of 
 itself no more praiseworthy than is electric- 
 ity. The vital consideration is, who applies it 
 and for what purpose. If the object be evil, 
 then the harm done is greater in proportion 
 to the greater efficiency. The voltage of a 
 lightning bolt which sets fire to a town might 
 supply power to run a dozen factories. 
 Granted that Kultur-made efficiency ranks 
 first, has it been justified by its works? Are 
 
2i8 GERMANY vs. CIVILIZATION 
 
 the system which plotted for the Atrocious 
 War, and the efficiency which has conducted 
 it, to be commended as the final crown of 
 Civilization? Would you who read be proud 
 of your scheme of life if it revealed you as 
 cruel, dishonorable, lying, unchivalrous, and 
 as an egomaniac who did not shrink at mur- 
 der? Under the touchstone of Kultur collec- 
 tive Germany stands so revealed. Satan, 
 who turns all material inventions to his own 
 uses, and sucks out the souls of men in order 
 that their bodies and their minds may serve 
 him, is the Master of that Efficiency for Hate 
 which Kultur has bred in Germany. 
 
 "We don't care how many nations hate us, 
 so long as they fear us," said recently a leader 
 of German opinion. In such words Kultur 
 epitomizes its message to mankind; in such 
 words posterity will write its epitaph. 
 
 Kultur has had many forerunners, differ- 
 ing in specific aim and in scale, but similar in 
 character. The Spanish Inquisition, for in- 
 stance, was in essence almost the exact coun- 
 
THE SHIPWRECK OF KULTUR 219 
 
 terpart of Kultur. It strove to compel abso- 
 lute submission to itself as the agency " above 
 Society/' not of the Prussian Gott, but of a 
 perversion of the Christian God. The Inquisi- 
 tion threw over Humanity, Justice, Mercy, 
 and set up standards of its own, intended to 
 promote only its own interests. To secure 
 conformity and obedience, it imprisoned, har- 
 assed, terrorized, tortured, and destroyed its 
 victims. Like Kultur, the Inquisition main- 
 tained a large corps of eavesdroppers and 
 spies. Like Kultur, it taught a nation to ac- 
 cept without demur its declaration that it 
 was engaged in the highest mission known 
 to mankind. It did not, indeed, organize an 
 army to wage bodily war against its enemies; 
 it simply used, in case of need, the armed force 
 of temporal rulers to carry out its commands. 
 It both aspired to be and was a world-power, 
 in so far as it was co-extensive with the Span- 
 ish Empire. 
 
 Millions of people accepted the teachings 
 of the Inquisition and fell quite naturally into 
 
220 GERMANY vs, CIVILIZATION 
 
 the inhuman state of mind which such teach- 
 ings induce. Like many a German who would 
 personally shrink from committing cruel acts, 
 the Spaniards and the other races whom the 
 Inquisition held in subjection came to gloat 
 over collective cruelty. How many millions 
 of holiday-makers, men, women, and children, 
 went out from Seville to the Quemadero and 
 witnessed with rejoicing the autos-da-fe of 
 thirty-five thousand heretics whom the In- 
 quisition burned there in the course of three 
 centuries? The feelings of those Spanish 
 spectators, as they beheld such human sacri- 
 fice offered up by the Inquisition to its deity, 
 did not differ from those of the Aztecs who 
 watched the blood sacrifices on their pyramid 
 temples, or from those of the French Terror- 
 ists who attended the daily exercise of the 
 guillotine, or from those of the Germans who 
 shouted their hallelujahs at the slaughter of 
 the innocents in the Lusitania. 
 I Under whatever name Kultur operates, it 
 tends downward. The individual who thinks 
 
THE SHIPWRECK OF KULTUR 221 
 
 himself a Superman is likely to end in a mad- 
 house or on the gallows: the nation, despotic 
 king, or hierarchy, which substitutes its own 
 selfish interests for humanity, shuts itself out 
 from humanity, becomes inhuman, revives 
 and worships standards of the Beast, and 
 heads straight for perdition. 
 
CHAPTER XIV 
 
 DESPOTISM OR DEMOCRACY? 
 
 Those arguments that are made, that the inferior race 
 are to be treated with as much allowance as they are cap- 
 able of enjoying; that as much is to be done for them as their 
 condition will allow, — what are these arguments? They 
 are the arguments that kings have made for enslaving the 
 people in all ages of the world. ... All the arguments in 
 favor of kingcraft were of this class; they always bestrode 
 the necks of the people — not that they wanted to do it, 
 but because the people were better off for being ridden. . . . 
 Turn it whatever way you will, — whether it come from 
 the mouth of a king, an excuse for enslaving the people 
 of his country, or from the mouth of men of one race as a 
 reason for enslaving the men of another race, — it is all 
 the same old serpent. 
 
 Lincoln, Reply to Douglas, Chicago, July lo, 1858. 
 
 ON July 3, 1866, when Prussia, by de- 
 feating Austria at Sadowa, became 
 preponderant in Germany, the Champion of 
 European Despotism in an irrepressible con- 
 flict with Democracy was designated. Had 
 Prussia been beaten there, she might never 
 have dominated Germany, especially if Bis- 
 
DESPOTISM OR DEMOCRACY? 223 
 
 marck had carried out his resolve to blow his 
 brains out in case of defeat. The triumph of 
 Prussia then and her overwhelming victory 
 in 1870 made her the citadel of European 
 Despotism. Her talent for organization, the 
 feudal instinct innate in the Germans, the 
 Hohenzollern ambition, the tenacity of the 
 upper classes, the bureaucracy, and the genius 
 of Bismarck, all worked together to perfect 
 a despotic machine fitted not only to repel 
 the invasion of Democracy but to conquer it. 
 Less than half a century ago Bismarck pre- 
 dicted that constitutional government would 
 soon cease to exist in Europe. By a note- 
 worthy coincidence Moltke said that the 
 Germans would have to be ready for fifty 
 years to defend Alsace and Lorraine — a hint 
 that he had created an excuse for perpetuat- 
 ing Militarism in the German Empire. Bis- 
 marck so disliked having a republic for a 
 neighbor that he even considered intriguing 
 with the French Imperialists to restore Napo- 
 leon III to the throne; but as time went on he 
 
224 GERMANY vs. CIVILIZATION 
 
 thought that the lack of centraHzation in a 
 repubHc and the inability to act quickly and 
 unitedly more than counterbalanced the pos- 
 sible harm that might come from the sight 
 of a republic on the German frontier. Sure of 
 his competence to bleed France white when- 
 ever he chose, he took malign pleasure in 
 the blunders of the French Republic, holding 
 them up as proofs of the inferiority of the 
 republican form of government. Before 1870 
 free institutions were the ideal of many 
 middle-class Germans, and of some aristocrats; 
 but after 1870 the ideal of Freedom slowly 
 faded away, and the fact of Despotism, thinly 
 disguised at first, took its place. The German 
 incapacity for self-government, openly pro- 
 claimed by their leaders, from Bismarck to 
 Bernhardi, was shown by the readiness with 
 which they allowed themselves to be pater- 
 nalized. 
 
 The only element which did not willingly 
 take its place in the autocratic system was the 
 Socialist. Bismarck persecuted the Socialists, 
 
DESPOTISM OR DEMOCRACY? 225 
 
 and yet they multiplied. The Kaiser declared 
 that to him "the word Social Democrat is 
 synonymous with enemy of Empire and 
 Fatherland," and he handled them roughly; 
 but still they grew. Nevertheless, they have 
 had as yet no influence in checking Militarism 
 or in spreading popular liberty, and they were 
 as chaffs before a hurricane when the Kaiser 
 proclaimed his Atrocious War. Prussianized 
 Germany stood unshaken as the champion" 
 of Despotism. Nothing could be more nat- 
 ural than that Austria-Hungary should have 
 clung to her as a vassal to his suzerain; be- 
 cause the Austrian dynasty was as insatiate 
 as the Prussian for autocratic rule, but had 
 grown too senile to exercise it successfully. 
 So, too, the Turkish Sultan recognized in the 
 German Emperor a bird of kindred feather 
 whose golden perch he gladly shared. Nor 
 is it insignificant that William II has exerted 
 an influence on the Holy See surpassing that ' 
 of any other Protestant monarch: for the 
 Roman Papacy, like the Holy Roman Empire, 
 
226 GERMANY vs. CIVILIZATION 
 
 of which the German Empire regards itself 
 as the heir, was the most remarkable of 
 medieval products. 
 
 Aristocracies are everywhere solidaire. One 
 noble does not need to tell another that their 
 existence depends on maintaining the social 
 and political system which upholds privilege 
 and assigns the highest privileges to aristo- 
 crats. But not the upper classes alone, every 
 class which has acquired vested rights or a 
 preferred social position resists the modifica- 
 tion of the system in which it lives. The Prus- 
 sianized German Despotism has very cleverly 
 arranged it so that the Ballins, Krupps, and 
 scores of similar capitalists, who, if they were 
 Americans, German critics would brand as 
 vulgar plutocrats, are much-honored mem- 
 bers of the social organism. Indeed, Junkers 
 intermarry gladly with the plutocrats, and 
 the Kaiser has always shown a preference for 
 millionaires — condescensions which relieve 
 them from any social disability. But the 
 really vital fact to note is, that the Hohen- 
 
DESPOTISM OR DEMOCRACY? 227 
 
 zollern Autocrat has bound not only the 
 Court, the official Church, and the Nobility, 
 but also Capital to his cause. The lower 
 classes alone have not been completely won 
 over. So powerfully welded together are the 
 forces of Despotism in Germany ! 
 
 Democracy has no such organization. If 
 the President of the United States or of 
 France, if the King of England or of Italy 
 were to brandish a sword and shout, " My will 
 is the supreme law of the State; I hold the 
 life and death of every inhabitant in the hol- 
 low of my hand!" the people of those coun- 
 tries would burst into a roar of laughter 
 which would echo round the globe, and then 
 they would appoint a commission de lunatico 
 inquirendo. That the Germans have listened 
 reverently to such pronouncements by their 
 Kaiser, accepting them as proper and logical, 
 indicates how far apart Despotism and De- 
 mocracy stand, and how irreconcilable their 
 doctrines are. 
 
 Once all governments were despotic. Then 
 
228 GERMANY vs. CIVILIZATION 
 
 a group or class acquired certain rights. 
 Then the conception of individual liberty was 
 slowly evolved. Every one possessed an irre- 
 ducible minimum of selfhood, most precious 
 to himself, which no power had the right to 
 deprive him of. Out of this came republics 
 of free men and the gradual extending of 
 political freedom from class to class, until the 
 lowest received it and true Democracy was 
 reached. 
 
 The peoples through whom this demo- 
 cratizing process worked came to regard the 
 ideal of Freedom, like that of Justice, as axi- 
 omatic: a slave no more requires to be per- 
 suaded that freedom is better than slavery 
 than does a sick man that health is better than 
 disease. The champions of Democracy were 
 too certain that its truths are self-evident 
 and will automatically work the conversion 
 of every doubter as soon as he hears them. 
 The fundamental need of Democracy is dis- 
 cipline, and that is all the more difficult to 
 organize and apply in a society based on the 
 
DESPOTISM OR DEMOCRACY? 229 
 
 cardinal principle that each of its members 
 shall be hampered as little as possible by the 
 State in his personal freedom. 
 
 We are so accustomed to bemoan the de- 
 fects and failures of Democracy and to over- 
 look its mighty achievement that we too 
 readily swell the chorus of its enemies. The 
 truth, however, that the American Republic 
 should have progressed as far as it has towards 
 Democracy is more stupendous than that 
 Prussia should have transformed Germany 
 into a Despotism of the highest Prussian type. 
 In America we had to overcome the inherent 
 obstacles raised by geography and clashing 
 sectional interests, besides the difficulties 
 which confront a great experiment, and then 
 we have had to assimilate forty or fifty mil- 
 lions of foreign birth or foreign parentage, 
 who came mostly from countries where 
 Democracy was unknown, and where the 
 proposition that men are created free was 
 scoffed at. Prussia, on the contrary, found 
 the Germans a homogeneous people, already 
 
230 GERMANY vs, CIVILIZATION 
 
 moulded as to temperament and customs, 
 and abnormally responsive to discipline, who 
 changed with little sense of dislocation from 
 the treadmills of their particular States to 
 the Imperial treadmill whose pace was regu- 
 lated at Berlin. 
 
 Prussia also, let us not forget, did not trust 
 to the innate seduction of her doctrines to 
 convert her German neighbors. She relied 
 first on military coercion, the method repug- 
 nant to Liberal souls. "Anybody can govern 
 by martial law," said Cavour. Nor should we 
 forget that it is easier to work to perfection 
 a lower species of government than to run a 
 higher species even with mediocre results. 
 As Despotisms were early forms, so they have 
 remained lower forms. I doubt whether the 
 efficiency of the HohenzoUem Despotism is 
 relatively greater than that of Rameses the 
 Second. The chief difference which would 
 strike Rameses, if he visited Prussia today, 
 would be that, instead of multitudes of 
 avowed slaves, he would find that the hewers 
 
DESPOTISM OR DEMOCRACY? 231 
 
 of wood and drawers of water, although the 
 Kaiser's will is absolute over them, thought 
 and called themselves freemen; and on inquir- 
 ing, he would be told that this is a subtle 
 tribute to the very democratizing spirit 
 against which German Despotism has forti- 
 fied itself. It tries to hide its own nature 
 under a new name, but poison is poison, what- 
 ever the label on the bottle. 
 
 So the fated conflict between Despotism 
 and Democracy is joined. Despotism has 
 organized as never before. Under the flimsy 
 decoy of the State it has enticed all classes in 
 Germany to trust their destiny in its hands. 
 It has taught them, just as the Inquisition 
 taught its millions, that it is their mission to 
 impose Kultur on all peoples, exterminating 
 those who resist. It has revamped the pagan 
 religion of Valor, in which Odin is renamed 
 Gott. It has its willing historians and phil- 
 osophers and its obsequious moralists and 
 professors; it has its Krupp. 
 
 Its antagonist, Democracy, has never been 
 
232 GERMANY vs, CIVILIZATION 
 
 organized against such a concrete enemy; but 
 the time has now come when the Democratic 
 nations must prove that they can, not only 
 defend themselves against Teutonic Despo- 
 tism, with its Turkish accomplice, but can 
 put down and hold down the outlaws who 
 would destroy Civilization and set up Kultur 
 in its stead. 
 
 We Americans must not be lulled into in- 
 action by the belief that this Titanic struggle 
 does not and cannot concern us. The Germans 
 make no secret of their calculation that, when 
 they have destroyed the British Empire, 
 only Russia and the United States will stand 
 between them and world-dominion. Russia 
 is so backward that they think it will require 
 two or three generations for her to become an 
 imminent danger; but they regard the United 
 States as an easy prey — the "damned Yan- 
 kees," as one of their diplomats recently called 
 us, are "so simple." With Imperial Britain 
 and the British Navy shattered, they reckon 
 that a few years will suffice to give them 
 
DESPOTISM OR DEMOCRACY? 233 
 
 control over here. The Atlantic Ocean has 
 ceased to be a protection against material 
 assaults; and since about 1900 the United 
 States have been infested by the agents of 
 Kultur who say now openly, what only a little 
 while ago they whispered in their secret bur- 
 rows, that they are going to Germanize this 
 country. They have found demagogues — • 
 "demagogues are the commonplace of his- 
 tory" — to work slyly in their behalf, and 
 they have gathered into their service unsus- 
 pecting sentimentalists, visionaries who de- 
 lude themselves into thinking that the Atro- 
 cious War can be stopped by uttering a few 
 ladylike phrases and that the wounds of the 
 ten million living victims of Kultur can be 
 healed by a little sprinkling of rose-water. 
 
 But this Republic, reserved by Providence 
 to be the land in which the children of all 
 races should unite and prove that the higher 
 Democracy is not an unrealizable dream, 
 must not perish now by the asphyxiating 
 gases of the German propagandists or by 
 
234 GERMANY vs. CIVILIZATION 
 
 demagogues and deluded visionaries. Having 
 been warned, we must be prepared, not merely 
 because of the peril that our own lives and 
 condition may run, but far more in order that 
 we may hand on to posterity the holy prin- 
 ciples of Democracy, which many generations 
 of the noblest men and women toiled and bled 
 and died to establish. 
 
 The Liberty which Democracy aspires to 
 is not a fixed substance. It cannot be pre- 
 scribed in uniform portions to all peoples 
 alike. It is, rather, a state of mind, a spiritual 
 influence, which transforms those who possess 
 it. If it were to be suddenly given to the Ger- 
 mans in the same measure in which the Eng- 
 lish have had it for generations, it would 
 probably craze them. If it should adopt the 
 creed of Kultur and set out to force itself on 
 the world, under penalty of slaying those who 
 resisted, it would cease to be Liberty. 
 
 Do not be deceived. In this conflict there 
 can be neither truce nor compromise. Do not 
 suppose, you who shuddered to hear how 
 
DESPOTISM OR DEMOCRACY ? 235 
 
 Kultur practiced Frightfulness in Belgium, 
 that the same Frightfulness will not be un- 
 leashed here as soon as an army of Kultur 
 gains a foothold on our shores. The Germans 
 here who shouted their shameless "Hoch! 
 Hoch!" over the sinking of the Lusitania will 
 indulge in orgies of rejoicing if ever they see 
 New York or Boston or Philadelphia blasted 
 by Frightfulness. The most honored men of 
 these cities will be taken as hostages, abused 
 and murdered as if they were Belgian notables, 
 and the women — let Belgium teach what 
 will be their fate. For the Germans sneer at 
 us as a pusillanimous people, easily terror- 
 ized, and they think that we neither can nor 
 will defend ourselves. 
 
 Two years ago few Americans believed that 
 the Kaiser and his Ring would ever start the 
 world-war which they had long planned. It 
 seemed too wild, if not too wicked; and it 
 seemed incredible that sixty million Germans 
 really accepted Kultur as their religion. But 
 the crime was committed, and Kultur has 
 
236 GERMANY vs. CIVILIZATION 
 
 thrown down its mask. Let no one hope, 
 therefore, that higher ideals alone will save 
 Civilization, or that it is unthinkable that in 
 this twentieth century a system which re- 
 duces man and society to a machine, which 
 revives the barbaric creed that war is the nor- 
 mal state of the human race, which preaches 
 that it is the duty of the strong to persecute 
 and exterminate the weak, can overcome the 
 world. Four centuries ago the Spaniards, 
 who according to their lights matched the 
 modern Germans, took the ascendant in 
 Europe and held it for fourscore years, and 
 wherever they settled moral and intellectual 
 blight ensued. Let us see to it that the 
 Prussianized Germans are not allowed to 
 spread a similar blight and to restore under 
 new forms the barbarism of the Vandals and 
 Huns. 
 
 Do you believe that every man by virtue 
 of being a man has inalienable rights which 
 no master should deprive him of? Do you 
 believe that the condition of humanity into 
 
DESPOTISM OR DEMOCRACY? 237 
 
 which we all are born creates ties which bind 
 us all together, and warrants each of us in 
 looking for certain common attributes like 
 pity and the love of liberty in all our fellows? 
 Or do you believe that a few are born to phys* 
 ical strength which entitles them to domi- 
 nate and enslave the others with whom they 
 acknowledge no bond nor kinship? "Man- 
 kind," said Prince Windisch-Gratz, that typi- 
 cal Teuton, "begins with Barons." Is Love 
 or Hate the corner-stone of your religion and 
 the inspirer of your conduct? In the crises 
 of your life, when you turn for help to an- 
 other, does your ideal lead you to expect to 
 see his human features fade out and leave you 
 face to face with a wolf or a tiger? That is 
 the culmination of Kultur. 
 
 Those of us who believe in Civilization 
 know that Liberty — the soul of Democracy 
 — is the condition without which permanent, 
 spiritual good can neither spring up nor thrive. 
 In its deathless presence the Imperial lusts 
 of the HohenzoUerns, like the empires of those 
 
138 GERMANY vs. CIVILIZATION 
 
 who were greater than they, are seen in their 
 true nature, material, mundane, mortal. 
 
 " For He that worketh high and wise, 
 Nor pauses in his plan, 
 Will take the sun out of the skies, 
 Ere Freedom out of man." 
 
 THE END 
 
CAMBRIDGE . MASSACHUSETTS 
 U . S . A 
 

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