YALE UNIVERSITY LIBRARY GERMAN WORLD POLICIES THE MACMILLAN COMPANY NEW YORK - BOSTON ¦ CHICAGO ¦ DALLAS ATLANTA • SAN PRANCISCO MACMILLAN & CO., Limited LONDON • BOMBAY • CALCUTTA MELBOURNE THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, Ltd. TORONTO GERMAN WORLD POLICIES (DER DEUTSCHE GEDANKE IN DER WELT) BY PAUL ROHRBACH TRANSLATED BY DR. EDMUND VON MACH AUTHOR OF "WHAT GERMANY WANTS" Nfta Iforfe THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 1915 AU rights reserved Copyright, 1915 By THE MACMILLAN COMPANY Set up and electrotyped. Published February, 1915. TRANSLATOR'S PREFACE Paxil Rohrbach has been for several years the most popular author of books on pohtics and economics in Germany. He is a constructive optimist, but at the same time an incisive critic of those defects of character and pohtical conditions which keep his people, as he thinks, from playing the great part in the world to which they are caUed. In an age of materiaUsm Rohrbach is an idealist, albeit a practical one. The miUtary conquests of the world, he claims, count for Uttle, and the moral conquests for everything. To make moral conquests, a nation must clean house, and divest itself of every vestige of a reac tionary past. Freedom and democracy are the watch words of the present, and a nation which claims its share in the shaping of the future of the civihzation of man kind, must act according to them, at home as weU as abroad. Germany is the youngest of the world powers and the most thriving, but she has not yet found herself, so to SDeak. She is, however, capable also of being the most VI TRANSLATOR S PREFACE Anglo-Saxon races, whose breadth of vision she should make her own. In this book, which was written in 191 2, Dr. Rohrbach bids his countrymen stop and think. Germany has grown strong in spite of historical difficulties and geo graphical obstructions. If the character of her people deserves it, and if the Germans know what they want, and learn how to adapt themselves to the altered condi tions, this growth wiU continue. The book is very intimate, and even the smaUest de fects are pointed out without palliation. Disconnected passages, therefore, may easily be made to convey the impression that the author is deeply disappointed with his fellow-citizens; but the book as a whole proves that Paul Rohrbach is proud of being a German, and that he beUeves that Germany, with all its defects, offers greater promises of service for mankind than any other country. Rohrbach was no prophet of a future war, for in his heart he did not beheve the danger, which was threaten ing Germany, to be so terrible as his pen at times pic tured it. For this very reason a translation of his book is most timely. The reader is taken back two years, and sees how the future of Germany and the individual duties of her people then appeared to a thoughtful Ger man and, through him, to hundreds of thousands of his countrymen. The reader will find no plans of aggression TRANSLATOR S PREFACE VU no desires for territorial conquests, and no suggestions of unethical deaUngs with unsuspecting neighbors. From the first page to the last the author expresses his firm belief that morality and fair dealing are the basis on which alone success is built. And now after two years, Dr. Rohrbach's pamphlets and addresses are again the most widely read hterature of Germany, while he himself is as firmly convinced as anybody that a most grievous wrong has been com mitted, but that Germany is innocent. If this book is to give the foreign reader a true insight into the character of the German people and their aims, fears, and aspirations, it must be translated just as Dr. Rohrbach wrote it. The translator, therefore, has refused to be an editor and has refrained from amending, excising, or modifying even those passages in which Dr. Rohrbach has carried his criticism too far. Only those few paragraphs have been omitted in which the author iUustrated his points with instances which every German recognized as having reference only to local conditions, but which to a foreign reader would have been unintelligible without an extensive commen tary. The title of the German book, Der Deutsche Gedanke in der WeU, is UteraUy translated " The German Idea in the Worlrl." Since the German word Gedanke connotes a viii translator's preface word idea, the title of the translation has been changed to "German World Policies." This book probably inspired more Germans than any other book pubhshed since 187 1, for everybody felt that it presented a generaUy true picture of the fatherland and indicated the paths which the Germans had re solved to foUow. Edmund von Mach. Cambridge, Mass. December 10, 19 14. CONTENTS PAGE Translator's Preface v-viii Introduction 3-9 Idealism vs. Materialism — The German idea — Progress vs. Retrogression — Morality only absolute power — Germany's fate is England. Chapter One: Historical Liens 10-37 Confines of old German empire — Modern Germany bears expenses of cultural and political existence of many small states — No intimate contact with them — North German character — Many Germans lost to Empire — Comparison with other nations — Reli gious division — Catholicism and nationality — Thirty Years' War — Germany's late entry as a world power — Tremendous advance since 1871. Chapter Two: Obstructions from Within 38-65 Defects of individualism — Social divisions in Ger many and elsewhere — New demands of an epoch of culture — Germans unable to see everything in the mirror of their own national interest— English "ar rogance" — A broader outlook needed — Changes in China, Turkey and Africa — Expansion of com merce of the world — Grandeur of English Empire — English example to be followed — Need of personal sacrifices — Italian sacrifices. Chapter Three: External Foundations of the Na tional Idea 66-94 Need of a broad local basis — Character of country — Unprotected frontiers— Material advance based on X CONTENTS PAGE that of other countries — National wealth in Europe — Military expenditures in Germany and other countries. Chapter Four: Strength and Weakness 9S_I32 Moral causes of increased population — German ef ficiency — Rapid growth of merchant marine — In tensity of labor, scientific accuracy, unexcelled sense of duty — Industrial competition — Ideal factors im portant in material life — Advantages and defects of German school -Enghsh supremacy threatened — German happiness in work — Russian weakness — Strength and weakness in France — Expenditures for luxuries vs. self-defence — German and EngHsh of ficials — Greatest political morality in England — Appearance of reactionary political forms to be avoided — Social Democracy — Grandest German achievements in form of individual genius — Religion and democracy. Chapter Five: Germany Across the Ocean 133-156 The importance of colonies — Enghsh colonial man agement — Increase of German colonies possible only in Africa — Colonial character — Errors and suc cesses of German colonial policies — Growing pros perity of colonies — Great hopes for the future — Self-government for colonies — Lessons to be learned from England. Chapter Six: Our Foreign Policy 157-211 Clausewitz' definition of war — Bismarck and Ed ward VII greatest modern masters of statecraft — Japan fighting Russia in the interest of England — English anti-German alliances — Three keys to Eng lish policy: Mesopotamia, Egypt, East Africa — The Bagdad Railway — The Turkish empire — English occupation of Egypt — The Balkan powder box — Turkish Revolution — Servian-Bosnian crisis — Death of Edward VII — English world policies insufficiently CONTENTS XI PAGE understood in Germany — Growth of English ani mosity against Germany — Helgoland — German com mercial advance— English admirals on necessity of crushing rivals — Historical parallels — Modem English press comment — Saturday Review, Sep tember, 1897, proclaims Enghsh obligation to fight for "two hundred fifty million pounds of commerce" — Other English voices — Enghsh pride hurt at having to recognize Germany as an equal — Good relations between Germany and England desirable and not impossible — English attitude toward American navy — Germany's need of a navy — Naval history since the introduction of the Dreadnought type — English policy consistent — Erroneous belief that Germany overpopulated — For years no emigration — German policy contemplates no conquests by force — Germany like England needs the markets of the world — The diplomatic service. Chapter Seven: Moral Conquests 212-243 Germany's reputation abroad — Bismarck's regard for public opinion of the world — Moral conquests should begin at home — Misunderstandings abroad due to a few reactionary remnants at home — Con fusion due to liberal German and old Prussian con stitution — The real Germany not reactionary — Turkey possible field for moral conquests — The Turkish character — Turkish estimates of Germany — China opened to the world — Confucianism vs. Christianity — Foreign missions — Marvellous success of English and American missions — The German missions— Values of German character — Need of determination to press for moral conquests. GERMAN WORLD POLICIES GERMAN WORLD POLICIES INTRODUCTION Idealism and materiaUsm respectively control our study of history. Both accept as correct the proposition that every happening results in the selection of the fittest. But since they interpret this proposition differently, their agreement is only superficial. The materialistic historian beUeves that those people conquer in the strug gle for existence who cleverly perfect, and selfishly, even ruthlessly, use the means provided by a world of material forces. All so-caUed ideas and leading personaUties, all struggles and catastrophes are to him only the result of an economic process of development. Starting with such a premise, it is not possible to reach a moral valuation of the German idea, or of any other national idea, for if moraUty itself is merely a bubble which has risen from the turmoU of ideaUess happenings, and possesses so doubtful an existence that one cannot teU how long it will influence the thoughts of men, then no ordinary and transient occurrence of history deserves to be viewed from an ideaUstic point of view. As for ourselves, we wish to assert at the very beginning that moraUty is not 3 4 GERMAN WORLD POLICIES only an absolute power, but the only absolute one for human understanding, and as such marks the aim and the norm of human progress. Since such progress does not at first take place in the human race as a whole, but in the several nations, it can only be fostered if each in dividual faithfully does his share of the work among his own people. In speaking of the German idea in the world we mean the ideal force of Germanism as a forma tive power in relation to the present and future happen ings of the world. We start very consciously with the conviction that we have been placed in the arena of the world in order to work out moral perfection, not only for ourselves, but for all mankind. We believe that this principle and no other governs the continuous selection of the fittest of the peoples, and we are thinking of those who have actuaUy contributed their part to the advance of human progress by placing upon the world the impress of their own national idea. History teaches us that this has often happened without the possession of an exceptionally powerful poUtical em pire. The Greeks possessed such an empire only for a short space of time under Alexander, and the Jews never. The Arabs and the Mongolians, on the other hand, called into existence poUtical entities of gigantic proportions, without adding anything of their own to the positive values of the culture of the world. Only in the Roman empire has an immediate union existed between an in- INTRODUCTION 5 ternal world-transforming power and an external abun dance of political supremacy. The genius of Rome would not have been a determining factor for future generations, like that of Greece or Israel, if the people who created it had been confined to a corner of the Mediterranean. The Roman idea was able to display its full grandeur only as the Roman sphere of influence grew to gigantic propor tions. Rome had to be the mistress of the world before she could determine the political and legal thoughts of future generations. It is not necessary to claim for the German idea that it wiU exist Uke the Roman either as the mistress of the world or not at all, but it is right to say that it will exist only as the co-mistress of the culture of the world, or it wiU not exist at aU. The Anglo-Saxons have spread over such vast expanses that they seem to be on the point of assuming the cultural control of the world, thanks to their large numbers, their resources and their inborn strength. Russia, which is the largest and most populous non- Anglo- Saxon poUtical entity, is bereft of its former world- embracing poUtical prospects because of its inner lack of culture and its dissensions. France, the rival of England on either side of the ocean in the 18th century, and its superior in its general influence on the culture of the world, has voluntarUy withdrawn from the competition of the world powers owing to the moral decUne of her people who have condemned themselves to a numericaUy 6 GERMAN WORLD POLICIES insufficient progeny. The German nation is the only one which has sufficiently developed by the side of the Anglo- Saxons, and is, moreover, numerically and inherently strong enough to claim for its national idea the right to participate in the shaping of the world which is to be. The correct interpretation of this proposition impnes that we shaU be able to maintain our power only if we continue to spread the German idea. We may not cease nor stop, nor even grant a temporary restriction of our sphere of influence, for we have only these alternatives, either to sink back to the level of one of the territorial people, or to fight for a place by the side of the Anglo- Saxons. We are like the tree rooted in the cleft rock. We may press the rock asunder and grow, or the resistance is so great that we are stunted for lack of food. You can not say: develop your culture, multiply your wealth, increase your scientific, technical and artistic abiUties, but give up your work in new lands as merchants and manufacturers, give up the buUding of ships, cease in vesting your money in the markets of the world, and sending your sons into distant lands to gather from the corners of the earth the fruit of your labor. How can we give up aU this, if we grow so rapidly that we gain in three years as many people as there are Swiss people in the whole world, in six years as many as inhabit Holland and Sweden, and in a generation as many as all the Spaniards and Portuguese combined? Our growth is the INTRODUCTION Jr process of natural strength. Only the withering of our natural sense of moraUty, such as the French people have experienced, or a terrible external catastrophe which ren ders us so poor that we can no longer bring up the children born to us, can put a stop to our increase. We grow and increase, but not in a huge land abound ing in everything needed for a Uving, — fruits of the fields, mines and raw materials — for we are confined between narrow and by no means favorable frontiers.v'Every year we have to import more food to appease our hunger and more material to keep our factories busy. Every year that part of our population which can Uve only when raw materials are imported and manufactured goods are ex ported, grows by one milhon souls. What we learn in school, our general knowledge, our technique, inventive power and art, our thoroughness and exactness, occasion aUy even a bit of good taste, aU this we use in the proc ess of transforming American wood and Spanish metal, Egyptian cotton and AustraUan mohair, caoutchouc from the Congo and hides from La Plata into finished products for the markets of the world. The markets of the world! We need them today for our existence as positively as we need our own land, and the day is ap proaching with irrevocable certainty when we shaU need them even more. We can be nationally healthy only so long as our share in the business of the world continues to grow, and only if this is the case shall we be able to GERMAN WORLD POLICIES foster the inner values which spring from our national idea, and let them take part with the other factors in the shaping of the culture of the world. If our growth should stop, this would be a catastrophe for us, both internaUy and externaUy, for as conditions are today this could not possibly be voluntary or natural. It could only happen if another people, or a combination of several, should strike us down so completely that we emerged from the struggle broken and infirm. The German idea, therefore, can only Uve and increase, if its material foundations, viz., the number of Germans, the prosperity of Germany and the number and size of our world-interests continue to increase. As these foun dations continue to grow they compel the Anglo-Saxons to make their decision between the following two proposi tions: Will they reconcile themselves to seeing our in terests in the world maintain themselves by the side of their own, and come to an agreement with us concerning them? Or will they fight, with force of arms, to remain the sole mistress of the world? If they choose the first proposition, they do so because of our strength. If they choose the latter, it wiU depend on our strength whether we conquer, or surrender, or hold our own. Germany's fate is England. The man who has studied the progress of the world during the last hundred years, and who knows something of the world today from his own observation, knows that there is only one important INTRODUCTION Q national-political question: "Is the Anglo-Saxon type destined to gain the sole dominion in those parts of the world where things are stiU in the process of develop ment, or wiU there be sufficient scope also for the German idea to take part in the shaping of the culture of the world on both sides of the ocean?" We must, therefore, ask ourselves two questions: In the first place, how much can we stake on the endeavor to gain for the German idea the greatest possible influence in the world, and secondly what are our national resources, with which we can reckon pohticaUy, and what finally are the encumbrances and Uens which are placed on them? The attempt to find an answer to these questions and to give a corresponding estimate of the future of the German people, wiU form the contents of this book. CHAPTER I HISTORICAL LIENS ^ Sorrow at our poUtical and rehgious disruption is our first feeling, when we begin to take stock of our national resources. Of the territory which five hundred years ago was the German empire and was inhabited by the German people united, at least in thought, into one poUtical organism, the Germany of today lacks at least one-third, comprising the German sections of Austria, the Netherlands, Belgium and Switzerland. If you add the Livonian provinces from the Memel to the Finnish Bay, where the peasants were largely not German, but the knights and the burghers were German, then the shrink age amounts to practically one-half of what was Ger many at the end of the Middle Ages. In this calculation we do not even consider those territories which, toward the end of the fourteenth century and at the beginning of the fifteenth century, were only loosely connected with the empire, and belonged, nationally at least, to France or Italy, as for instance Burgundy, the two Savoies, Milan, Mantua, Verona and other provinces. We confine ourselves, in the first place, to the countries long inhabited by German races, and secondly to the HISTORICAL LIENS II Slavic provinces in the East which were in the process of Germanic colonization. Bohemia also figures among them, for Germanization there was stopped only late, by the counter-reformation. The German frontier about the year 1400 receded only towards Poland farther west than it does today toward Russia. The province of Posen and a part of West Prussia and Schleswig, al though they are not entirely inhabited by Germans, are the only accretions which the modern empire has to show. But what does this mean compared with the com pact lands aU about us and inhabited by twenty miUions of people of German extraction who have lost the feel ing of a poUtical, yes, even of a national, connection with the German idea? The nearest relatives, moreover, of the German people, and their very next of kin, the Dutch and the Flemish, the German Swiss, and even some isolated communities of Austria, are insufficiently conscious of their own inabiUty to maintain a prosperous independence unless German culture as a whole sur vives, and is fostered by the growing German empire, and by it is made to enter into the makeup of the world. Let us give one instance of this interdependence. The wealth of the available scientific material today is so enormous compared with that of former ages, that only a big nation can master it. The scientificaUy active German people Uving beyond the confines of the empire, and in addition the Dutchmen and our more distant 12 GERMAN WORLD POLICIES relatives the Scandinavians, are obUged for the sake of their own scientific education to enter into a sort of working agreement with German science even in the realms of pure reasoning, because they are not numerous enough to produce either scientific masters of their own in every branch of learning or first-class' means of instruc tion. It is true, there are scholars of an international reputation' not only in HoUand, but also in Sweden, by whose labors Germany profits as much as the world at large, but it grows harder every day for a smaU country to produce anything perfect in the several branches of knowledge, because their increasing number demands specialization. The result is a continuously growing dependence on German science. Within the boundaries of a small country there are not enough people inter ested in certain specialized physical studies, even in those on which the progress of our whole knowledge of nature depends, to make possible an independent par ticipation in' their study. The same is true in other fields. Just as the smaUer states are unable to buUd a fleet of modern men-of-war, because the cost of even one such monster would completely upset their budgets, so they cannot produce a culture of their own and perfect in itself, from top to bottom, because the premises for it have grown to be of too enormous pro portions. If Germany thus bears no smaU part of the expenses HISTORICAL LIENS 13 needed for the cultural and political existence of the people of the old empire separated from the new, the forces which it draws from them are but smaU. As re gards Austria and Switzerland, one still can speak of a mutuaUy beneficial community of cultural interests, at least in the field of art and literature. In the sciences, however, the Austrian Germans are distinctly our debtors and not our creditors, except perhaps in national economy and history. Our pohticaUy friendly relations with Austria-Hungary may not be independent of the long history of the dynastical and national connections be tween the lands on either side of the Sudetes and the Bavarian Alps, but the discussion of this question does not belong here. As regards the Netherlands and the Flemish parts of Belgium, their separation from Ger many has become greater, so great in fact that one may almost say that their spiritual Ufe is no longer of any immediate importance for us. Things were very dif ferent at the time of the great Dutch painters, physicists, and economists in the seventeenth century, and even half a century later, owing to the friendly relations between the princes of the houses of Orange and of Brandenburg. Nobody can doubt, and the Dutch people least of all, — if they think it over carefully-r-that their Ufe would gain an immense impetus in every direction, if they were to unite again with the German empire, from which they have been estranged, formally since the treaty of 14 GERMAN WORLD POLICIES WestphaUa and actually since the time of Philip II. It is of course impossible to think here of coercion on our part, or to advocate the annexation of Holland. The resulting disturbance of the poUtical equiUbrium in Europe would be so distinctly in favor of Germany, that aU the other states would be justified in rising in protest against it. The same is very nearly true of our relations with Switzerland, where every German from the empire runs the risk of seeing his friendships broken when he uses the term German indiscriminately in reference to both German and German-Swiss affairs, unless he hastens to add that he is thinking only of the language and kin dred subjects. Such an exaggerated renunciation of every intimate contact with us reflects the material provin cialism of the small state, and the old individuahsm of the German races, which in this case has been hardened and quickened by the long poUtical separation. But we Germans of the empire err if we think that this explana tion settles the question. An equal share of responsibihty for the existing estrangement should be laid at the door of the North German element which has gained the hegemony in the new empire, and which has shown its inabihty to achieve in the world what one may call moral conquests. The short-sighted inflexibihty of the North German, and most especially of the Prussian, character which can produce great things only among its own people, is HISTORICAL LIENS 1 5 easily explained by the course of history. It deserves great and perhaps even the sole credit for the growth of Prussia to the state of a world power, and therefore in directly for the union of the greater number of integral parts of the old empire into the new empire. Neverthe less this special side of the Prussian character is develop ing more and more into an actual source of danger for our national future, especially in its modern unpleasant variations. Intentionally no reference has been made to those Germans who Uve no longer in locaUy well-knit com munities, but in isolated colonies scattered through Hungary and Russia, nor to the Germans in the Baltic provinces. The latter, to be sure, represents not a German colonization caUed in by a foreign prince, which of course would have had to renounce its political con nection with the mother country, but one which was the organic growth of the colonizing absorption of Livonia by the old empire, and which has survived for three centuries and a half. It was, however, the fate of Livonia that no Germanization of the Lettish and Esthnic in habitants took place. The German knights and priests and burghers entered Livonia and founded there German rule and municipaUties and the German CathoUc Church, in the same way as these three factors existed in the empire. The German peasant, however, did not cross the sea in the Middle Ages, and the road by land was l6 GERMAN WORLD POLICIES blocked by Livonia, which was too strong to be beaten down by the "Brethren of the German House." So it happened that the Prussian and the Livonian parts of the lands of the German knights hung together only by the narrow strip of road along the coast, and this tie was too slender to keep Livonia in the empire, when the Russians, the Swedes and the Poles rushed down upon it in the sixteenth century. Although no external connection has existed since that time between the Baltic-Germans and the empire, the mutual relations between them and their original homes have remained more active than one might have expected, considering the smaU number of Germans in the three Russian Baltic provinces. The explanation is that the Germans were constantly strengthened, even after they had lost their position of poUtical masters, by individual im migrations of high social standing, and were, con sequently enabled to develop a pecuUarly strong character. In contrast to them the many miUions of Germans who in the course of the centuries have emigrated into distant lands are practicaUy lost for the further develop ment of the German idea. In the innermost parts of Russia, to be sure, the Germans constitute a cultural element of a certain vitahty, even if it is not distinctly national, but they have hardly any effect on Germany itseK. In the Hungarian crown lands and their neigh- HISTORICAL LIENS 1 7 boring provinces the Germans could give strong support to the aUiance of the whole Hapsburg empire and Ger many, if conditions in. Hungary were different from what they happen to be today. But the effect of their activity on the German idea would at best be very indi rect. The Germans who have gone to America — an estimate of the people in the United States born in Ger many or descended from Germans who came to the States .in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries gives the figures as from twelve to fifteen milhons — are irre trievably lost to the German idea, because the great majority of them was recruited from the lower classes, who were poor -in culture. The very opposite, therefore, took place in America from what had occurred in the Baltic provinces. Barring the political emigration of 1848 which carried not only fine characters but also mental giants from Germany to America, so that Ger mans appeared at once in leading positions, most of the emigrants were poor and uneducated, or people who had failed at home. One or the other of them may have been able to resist the effects of the strong American Anglo- Saxon cultural Ufe, but he was unable to reveal to his children any specific cultural elements born of the Ger man idea. Consequently he could not prevent their linguistic and spiritual Americanization. The lot drawn by Germany with her emigrated children is a sad one. In the truest sense of the word she has fertilized with 1 8 GERMAN WORLD POLICIES them the soil on which the gigantic tree of Anglo-Saxon America, transplanted from England, has grown. This survey has shown us that the Germans of all the people in the world are most unfortunately placed as regards their total number compared with that part of them on which the development of the German idea depends. The Poles alone are in an even worse position because they have completely lost the poUtical founda tion for their national existence. If we compare our selves with the other people of Europe, we find that the French are closely knit into one compact poUtical unit, with the exception of an infinitesimally small part of them in Lorraine. Perhaps one might claim that those Swiss who speak French are as much French as the others are respectively Itahan or German. But the ethnographic relation is not identically the same, and this is true also of the Walloons. They are not an originally French tribe, separated by fate from France, as is the case with the Flemish and Dutch in respect to Germany.. On the contrary, they are an independent Romanesque nation, which began to adapt itself closely to the neighboring and related French people in the eighteenth century. Granted, however, that one wished to caU aU the French-speaking Swiss and Belgian people French, which according to their race would not be correct, even then only a little over three miUion Frenchmen would be Uving outside of HISTORICAL LIENS 19 France. That would still be a much more favorable state of affairs than ours. The two miUion French Canadians need not be considered, for while they have retained their speech and national character they regard themselves as natives of Canada and have no sentiments left for France. Russia misses from her poUtical confines about four miUions of her children, the so-called Ruthenes in GaUcia, the Bukowina, and Hungaria. Numerically this is a neghgible quantity considering the enormous mass of Russians who moreover rule within their country a num ber of ahen people. The ItaUans have coined the catch word "ItaUa irredenta," the unUberated Italy. With this they mean the Welsh-Tyrol and the territory about Trieste wliich belongs to Austria. Strangely enough they do not mean also Savoy, Nizza, and Corsica, which have been annexed by France. There are about one miUion ItaUans under Austrian rule, and as many in cluding Corsica under French rule. Considering the thirty-five miUion inhabitants of the kingdom of Italy, this amounts to only a fraction over five per cent. Spain vand Portugal are well-knit national states, and none of their people are Uving in Europe under foreign rule. Both, moreover, have founded big colonies across the ocean, while only about ten thousand real Spaniards are living under foreign rule in the former Spanish colonies, in the PhiUppines, and in Porto Rico 20 GERMAN WORLD POLICIES (Cuba is a repubUc under the protectorate of the United States). , Quite enough has been said about England. v The EngUshman who is not the subject of his king does not exist anywhere in the world. It also is a rare exception to find an EngUshman who has lost the sense of his na- tionaUty under whatever conditions he may find him self. Things are somewhat different, of course, with the daughter nations who either have evolved from poUtical England or are in the process of such an evolu tion. The Canadians, the AustraUans, the EngUsh- speaking South Africans, are no longer EngUsh in the sense of the real Enghshmen at home or in the tropics, where they Uve only a comparatively short time as officials, or as soldiers or merchants. The readiness to take root in a new soil across the ocean, and the rapidity of autogenous growth, which characterizes the British settlers, result in new national formations, thanks to the Uberal principles of Anglo-Saxon self-government. At first these new states show exceedingly close relations with the home country, but by and by they grow inde pendent. They constitute, however, no loss of political strength for the mother country, because the content of her cultural idea flows over into the new formations, even if poUtical fines of separation have arisen. It is hardly necessary to speak here of the smaUer nations of Europe, because they form no factors of con- HISTORICAL LIENS 21 sequence in the pohtics of the world. It is, to be sure, not at aU impossible that the friction occasioned notably in the Balkans by the regrettable demarcation fines be tween Servia, Roumania, Greece, etc., may excite poUt ical struggles, but such an effect of the Uttle feUows on the larger ones is, after aU, only indirect. The conditions of the smaU nations as such cannot be compared with those of the world powers. The Germans, therefore, are more weakened than any other European nation by the separation of many of her people from the state where the majority have found poUtical union. Hand in hand with this separation an other demarcation Une goes through Germany, which is spiritual and hardly less fateful, the division into a Protestant and a CathoUc part of the people. Within the confines of the empire the proportion is approxi mately as foUows: two- thirds are Protestant and one- third is CathoUc. The ten miUion German-Austrians are almost aU CathoUcs; the five and one-half million Dutch are two- thirds Protestant and the rest CathoUc; of the two and one-half miUion German-Swiss more than half are Protestant. Lumping the total number of Germans, the proportion of Protestants to CathoUcs is about four to three, and this proportion is practically maintained, even if one omits from the calculation the Dutch and the Swiss because of their complete poUtical and fairly com plete cultural separation. 22 GERMAN WORLD POLICIES What is the effect of this reUgious cleft on the strength of the German idea? Probably this very question will be sharply resented by the devout CathoUc element, as if it were an insult to the patriotism of the CathoUcs to make such a contrast between them and the Protestants. It is difficult for the CathoUcs of Germany to approach this dehcate subject as objectively as it should be met. [There is, however, a natural conflict between CathoUcism [and the national idea of a state, which is not only theo- /retical but actual and historical. The individual Catholic may be unconscious of this fact, and there are indeed CathoUc nations, such as the Spaniards, whose patriotism is as strong as their poUtical union. There also have been German CathoUcs among the leaders in the struggle for the poUtical unity of Germany, and they have been as virile representatives of the German idea as any. One only need mention such men as the Bavarian prime- minister and late chancellor Prince Hohenlohe. The natural deductions, nevertheless, of a great principle, cannot be avoided, however strongly and happily the character of exceptional personaUties may seem to correct them."** The fundamental principle of Catholicism em braces universaUsm and knows, spiritually, no national demarcation Unes. If we watch closely we shaU see that the church has ever known how to use most successfully, in its propaganda of spreading her idea of universaUsm, those people who have had the strongest national feelings. HISTORICAL LIENS 23 Again we need only think of Spain. When the church appears as the protagonist of national freedom, as in Austria today and in Poland, she does so largely for the sake of drawing closer the fetters which bind the people to her, by fostering their national characteristics. No CathoUc national pohcy can ever be the end; it is but the means to an end. Whoever desires to understand the true point of view of CathoUc principles let him study the writings of the long list of Catholic authorities from the Civitas Dei of St. Augustine through Thomas of Aquinas down to the Statutes of Ignatius of Loyola. Everywhere he wiU find our assertion confirmed that the national idea is ignored as a factor in the spiritual and moral education of the human race, and is frequently re jected as actuaUy harmful — sometimes directly and some times indirectly. This appears most glaringly in the attitude of the spiritual vanguard of modern CathoUcism, the Order of the Society of Jesus, which classes the feefing of distinct nationahty as one of the faifings which must be strongly combated. Our own conviction is opposed to this view, for we beheve that the weakening of the national idea has invariably resulted in the deterioration ' of the moral abiUties of a people. We do not mean to deny that great individual achievements are possible even at a period when the national sense of the great majority of the people is benumbed. Nor do we wish to defend that barbaric and uncultured Chauvinism which appears 24 GERMAN WORLD POLICIES wherever the national idea has left its temple and has de generated into an empty national phrase. Nations and mankind as a whole live by what the individual is ready to die for, and when so large a part of the possessions of the soul as that which has to do with nationahty and fatherland is cut adrift, then the inner worth of a people's character must of necessity suffer. The second fact which makes it difficult for German CathoUcs to do much for the outer and inner growth of the German idea is their obUgation to consider a non- German power. The term Ultramontanism has been coined to designate this relationship. Again our Catholic feUow-countrymen assure us, and generally as honestly as passionately, that they revere the pope, even if he Uves across the Alps, only as the common head of the whole CathoUc Christianity and the Vicar of Christ in this world. The assumption, however, that the pope is hovering, as it were, over all the people as an interna tional and inter-CathoUc institution, is true only in one's imagination, for it is contrary to fact. The papacy is an honor which for centuries has descended only on people of Romanesque extraction and especiaUy on ItaUans. The last German pope was the Dutch Hadrian VI (1522-1523). Since then only ItaUans have ascended the papal throne, and even before that non-Italian popes were the exception. In the coUege of cardinals also, which selects the pope, the ItaUans are predominant. HISTORICAL LIENS 25 Regarded from this point of view, the papacy is an in stitution through which a committee of Italian clergy rule the Catholic church, with a monarchical head, and a moderate number of co-adjutors selected from among the non-Italian CathoUcs. In addition, a multitude of ideas of a poUtical, reUgious, and superstitious nature are at work within the church organism and the Roman clergy. It is possible to grant all this, and to acknowl edge, nevertheless, that the Roman-Italian flavor of the papacy is of considerable and lasting strength just be cause the inherent force of every national idea needs must show itseff, even when continuous efforts are made to exclude it. The very fact that the papacy is accessible only to ItaUans, to the complete exclusion of every Ger man, lends to it a distinctly non-German flavor. This actual condition of affairs appears also when an action of the pope in favor of the universal power of the holy father is specificaUy directed against national poUtical pecuUar- ities at work among the German Catholics. We cannot close our eyes to the fact that the German CathoUcs are standing just now in a conflict between their wish to realize a general independence, spiritually and nationaUy, and the tendency of Rome to extinguish this independ ence; the German idea is at stake in this conflict, not di rectly but indirectly. The non-German but Roman papacy and the church which denies any higher right of a people unite in the endeavor to make their own interests 26 GERMAN WORLD POLICIES authoritative for a large part of the German people; and yet these interests are far removed from those of the Ger man idea, and often actuaUy opposed to it. They wish to compel the German Catholics to renounce aU poUtical activities by which their intimate connection with the rest of the Germans may manifest itseff. It is, therefore, wrong to confine the difference or the contrast between the Protestant and the CathoUc Ger mans to their creeds in a narrow and immediately re hgious sense, and to deny, from this point of view, the influence of the church on the amount of devotion to the national idea of which the one part or the other part of the whole people are capable. There is no neutral CathoUcism. It is always Roman. Wherever in the course of the centuries non-Roman Catholic manifesta tions have arisen, from the Byzantine schism down to the GalUcanism and old CathoUcism, the Roman church has always struck them down with aU her might, or if she was not strong enough, driven them out. The Ger man CathoUcs are, therefore, not only adherents of a certain beUef in things divine and human, but also mem bers of a comprehensive spiritual organization which is centraUy located outside of Germany, which is pre dominantly governed by foreigners, whose chief office is unattainable by any German, and whose chief prin ciple includes the negation of the autonomous value of the national idea itseff. If one considers aU this HISTORICAL LIENS 27 >ne is astounded at the amount of resistance agamst uch influences which our CathoUc feUow-citizens have naintained in favor of the national idea. But it is iquaUy apparent how impossible it is to claim that 10 interference exists. One single instance from the rery periphery of this thought may suffice. How enor- aous for instance is the difference of importance for he national idea between the Catholic and the Protes- ant clergy! During a certain period of history the "athoUc priests were the bearers of culture in Germany. lut this time Ues far back. Since our culture has eman- ipated itseff from the church, the cehbacy of priests nd monks has rendered miUions and miUions of men rho had risen individually to higher culture and educa- ion unfruitful for the future of the people, for their wn rise could not result in a higher level for any future eneration. In contrast to them, how large has the lfluence been of the homes of the Protestant ministers! 'hey have assisted in drawing into influential positions ie moral virtues which were latent deep down in the epths of the people. Among the CathoUcs as among ie Protestants the study of theology offers to the poor ut gifted sons of humble parents the easiest entrance 5 the educated upper classes. While with CathoUc riests this first step is also the last, the importance f the Protestant minister is apparent when we think f aU the names of leading Germans who were born 28 GERMAN WORLD POLICIES in the homes of Protestant ministers or were descended from those there born. We, therefore, sum up the importance of the fact that almost half of the Germans in and around Ger many are Catholics in the statement that the effects due to the principle of CathoUcism and the dominion of the Roman clergy prevent the CathoUc part of our people from doing as much for the progress of the German idea as the Protestant part can do. These effects are often unconscious ones for the individual Catholic, and they are in not a few instances happily neutralized by natural instincts and sentiments. In the great sum total of cases, however, they exist as powerful deterrents; for CathoUcism as such prevents men's natural readiness for ideal activities from turning to the weU defined pursuit of the national idea. It may foster other valuable, ideal instincts, which, however, point in different directions from the national. In mentioning aU this we have not yet touched upon the harm which has resulted from the rehgious division of the Germans, for the difference in creeds has fostered hostile contrasts between those who profess them, and is stiU fostering them. Is it necessary to refer to the Thirty Years' War and the constant weakening of Germany, even without armed war, owing to the waste of energy on the part of both Protestants and Cath oUcs, or to the effects of carrying reUgious differences HISTORICAL LIENS 29 of opinion into the poUtical field when the resulting friction retards the progress of our entire national organism? Those who know the CathoUc polemics against Prot estantism meet there the opposite arguments, accord ing to which the Protestants and not the CathoUcs are to blame for aU the harm occasioned by the religious separation of the sixteenth century, for which the former were responsible. This assertion is untenable, if for no other reason, because the Reformation at first was nothing but a reaction within the CathoUc church itseff. It was due to the growing resistance of the Catholics of German descent against the Romanesque and foreign elements in the church. These elements were pre-eminently responsible for those excesses which led to the final separation. The definition of the Ref ormation as a principle which divides churches and buUds new ones does not exhaust the process of draw ing those spiritual demarcation lines which characterize the change from the Middle Ages to Modernity. On the contrary, it is only a phenomenon of the spiritual development of our race from the restricted authority of a dogma to the strict authority of a reasoning con science. In this process which was natural and there fore had to take place, the Germanic races, and espe ciaUy the Germans, have taken the lead. It was our misfortune that the cleft did not occur between the 30 GERMAN WORLD POLICIES people of German and of Romanesque descent, but had to go clean through the middle of Germany. We have shown that external disruptions and internal reUgious differences are the two -serious defects which make it difficult for us, compared with the other great nations, to develop our national idea and to enforce it, for even from the churchly reUgious point of view the English, the French, the Russians, the Italians, and across the ocean the Americans have the advantage over us of greater unity. If we could equal them in these important factors in the development of national forces, political unity, and a thorough agreement of sentiment, then the scales would immediately adjust themselves in our favor. We have, however, not yet finished the enumeration of those items which turn out to be sources of weakness for us, and consequently of strength for the others. The final success of any nation in history depends on the time and conditions under which it first concentrates its full strength in opposition to outward interference, and the degree to which more or less severe crises at home have eaten up its strength. We have mentioned how destructive the German reUgious wars have been. Even greater harm has come to us from the long delay of our national unification. Of all our neighbors only the Italians secured unity as late as we, but then much more thoroughly, although they have still to prove their claim HISTORICAL LIENS 3 1 to the position of a world power. England, France, and Russia had a long start over us. We may even omit Russia from the discussion, for the examples of England and France suffice to show that our progressive present has to carry a heavy load in our inherited passion for factional disruption. This in fact is one of our greatest national faults. In this connection, we must not compare the French people of today with the Germans of today, for France maintains herself at present only by her inherited wealth, the talents she draws from the democracy of her poUtical Ufe, and by the national spring of energy which flows from her defeat of 1870 and 187 1. She could not pos sibly maintain her present high level, if one of these three factors were lacking. The French themselves poisoned the roots of their strength when they decided to be satisfied with a dearth of children. - France has been drawing on her capital ever since she ceased to grow in numbers, for her conduct of affairs may be called the most dangerous of all modes of hy pothecation. Her historical past had left her a definite fund of values on wliich she is drawing more heavily every year. Since not enough children are born, these loans are not investments, for there are no, prospects that they wiU ever be repaid. If one of our older genera tion who was in France in 1870 or '71 revisits today the cities which he knew then, he stands aghast to note 32 GERMAN WORLD POLICIES how time seems there to have stood still. The same houses and streets and squares, the same city confines as fifty years ago! In Germany, where there is an enormous increase of all large and fairly large cities, where there is a rapid development of aU communica tions, and an extraordinary increase of the fortunes and men, one can hardly imagine such a state of affairs. This is the outer picture of stopping on the road of na tional progress; and at home the double spectre of the French house makes its rounds: fear of a child and the harmful Ufe insurance. A poUcy' is laid into the crib of either of the two children — not more than two being the rule in French famiUes. In this way the French youth learns to adopt that insipid and weak conception of life, which sees the ideal for the individual in the avoidance of the struggle for existence. This moral effect of the two-children system is even worse than the numerical standstill of the population. France had reached the height of her strength during the two centuries from Louis XIII to Napoleon I. If we wish to appreciate the superiority over us which France gained by accomplishing her unity three hundred years before us, we must compare her glory in the seven teenth and eighteenth centuries with our misery then. As soon as France had become united, her influence in European politics steadily grew. According to aU nat ural presumptions France was the leader of the Ro- HISTORICAL LIENS 33 manesque people, and was able to gain the first place in Europe, because the German people, although stronger than the French, were pohticaUy disrupted into several states, and soon were to be divided also by religious differences. If Germany had kept pace with France in unification, a poUtical entity would have arisen in the heart of Europe centuries earher than it did, and the hegemony of France and of her culture in the world would never have been realized. We have got an overful taste of this French start, by hostile pressure in war, and by the inundation of our cultural Ufe with the French foam of the eighteenth century, while everything Ger man was considered to be almost barbarian. Through a trick of fate which remains one of the rid dles of life, in spite of the multitudinous attempts at an explanation, France today seems destined to with draw from the roster of the world's nations. One may, therefore, say that possibly history herself has drawn a Une under the long Ust of wrongs which France has done us in the past. But even in her weakness which has ren dered her harmless for us by herself, she will continue to be a momentous factor in any coaUtion against us under EngUsh leadership. It is here where our belated and imperfect national union may become fateful for us. If anywhere in the world a center of crystallization should be formed of people hostile to us, whose match we are if we take them alone, and if the anti-German 34 GERMAN WORLD POLICIES tendencies are there focussed on a common end, our position wiU not be easy. No special proof is neces sary of the assertion that such a center already exists in England. If we compare our fate as a whole nation with that of the English, we realize how great the progress of our country and of the German idea might have been, if we -bad obtained a national consoUdation as early as our cousins. This shows in two fundamentally different but mutuaUy interdependent ways. There is in the first place the material side. England was able to found her industries, commerce, wealth, and colonies, her whole world empire with all the assurance of main tenance, at a time when we continued to hve in com plete impotence and decay in aU these respects. Once before, Germany was one of the richest industrial countries in Europe. In the middle of the sixteenth century it was, perhaps, the richest of aU, if one con siders not so much the actual cash in circulation, as the sum total of the people's possessions; There can be no doubt that her industries led those of aU the other nations. One century later all this was changed and turned into its very reverse, just at the time when Eng land began to climb the road to her present height. If we had grown to be a united people instead of breaking up into hopeless factions and divisions, it would have been easy for us to keep pace also with England. HISTORICAL LIENS 35 At the end of the first Napoleonic era Germany had become an absolute pauper. Hardly a German ship showed the German flag, insignificant and little known, in foreign ports. Now and then there were humble beginnings of an industry, which, compared with those of France and England, amounted to nothing. Capital did not really exist in Germany. No matter where a German entered foreign lands, he never met respect. At best he was shown benevolent condescension while his abiUties were exploited, for they were not ennobled by any sense of proud self-reUance. It was the time when the common slur against the Germans as the "cultural fertihzer" of the world began to be true. And yet during this entire period of wretched outward conditions there was no other nation in Europe so nu merous as the German ! We had presumably more people than the Russians, more than the French, and many more than the EngUsh. But in poUtical abiUty or in economic development or in both we were outdistanced by all. Since that time the very process of unification of at least the greater part of the Germans has set free material forces of tremendous proportions, as appears from the study of the history of our commerce and in dustry since the foundation of the German empire. No one, however, wUl claim that we have become a different people. In national abiUties we are the same Germans we were in the eighteenth century. AU this proves how 36 GERMAN WORLD POLICIES pernicious our mad struggles with and against each other have been. We have progressed, within a generation, with a rapidity which creates the belief that we can wipe out in a decade the losses of a century. But we grow dizzy, when we contemplate our poUtical economy, shooting up to steep heights and resting only on the small sup port of European Germany, especiaUy when we com pare it with the jnuch wider security across oceans and continents which England and America have bmlt. It is here where the abyss is lurking into which our new grandeur may be hurled unless we secure it with stronger props than are made of iron or of gold. We have now reached the point which illustrates a fact which no one can view too seriously, namely, that the world power of the Anglo-Saxons does not rest solely on external sup ports, such as wealth, colonies, dominion over the seas and flourishing industries, but that corresponding to these material possessions a growth of character and of inner worth and an increase in the breadth of the Anglo- Saxon idea have actuaUy justified the people possessing them in reaching out for the dominion of the world. The question thus arises whether some of the effects of the pohtical and economic wretchedness of our condi tion during the time when the Anglo-Saxons were out distancing us, have not so impressed themselves upon the German mind, that they may endanger the future HISTORICAL LIENS 37 of the German idea, especially when they are added to our other inherited national faults. Joined therefore to the triple outward burden under which we are labor ing — an incomplete national union, reUgious dissen sion, and late entrance into the circle of the active na tions of the world, a fourth factor appears on the debit side of our national ledger. It comprises the checks placed on the progress of the German idea by the in herent defects of our character. These defects are in part inherited, as has already been indicated, and in part acquired during the period of our national decUne. Their character wiU be discussed in the next chapter. CHAPTER1 II OBSTRUCTION FROM WITHIN It is true of nations as of individuals that the avail able value of their energies does not equal the sum of their abiUties, but only the surplus of their positive over their negative quaUties. Napoleon I compressed his judgment of men into the sentence, that to ascertain a man's usefulness one should subtract his vanity from his abiUty, and teckon only with the balance. Nations should be judged accordingly. Their historical fate and the psychology of their character, shaped or in herited, develop their strength or their weakness, and the amount of positive strength which is needed to equahze their negative tendencies determines the size of the balance which can be placed at the service of the national idea. Among us Germans the strongest negative force threatening our national idea, both in the political and in the social Ufe, is our lack of appreciation of big things done jointly. We are unable to resist the blandishments of individual political and social interests. To put it directly, the powerful tendency of developing what is pecuhar in the individual, the tribe or any other group 38 OBSTRUCTIONS FROM WITHIN 39 within the nation, has worked ravages among the Ger mans as long as there has been a German history. It is difficult to say whence such national tendencies spring, but experience teaches us that they exist. Most people are satisfied to speak of instinct. This explains nothing, but we are glad to use the word, because it designates an established fact in a way which every one understands, and because it can also, be used to characterize a people. The insufficient sense of common interests of the Germans is, therefore, either an original defect or a limitation of their national instinct. In consequence the growth of their national idea seems a priori weighed down with a weakness which has shown its baneful influence throughout their history. The first to teU us something definite of our ancestors were the Romans, to whom we are indebted for the first characterization of the Germans. "And so I pray," says Tacitus, "that they may continue to hate each other thoroughly, if they cannot love us, for the greatest boon which fate can offer to the Roman empire, when it is hard pressed, is discord among its enemies." These prophetic words of Tacitus suggest not only the fate of Rome at the hand of the Germans, but also the fate of the Germans at their own hand. When the Germans were separated in the time of Herman, the prince of the Cheruski, into many tribes, they could not look upon themselves as the Romans did, 40 GERMAN WORLD POLICIES as aU one people, but it is most unfortunate that this originaUy natural feeUng of separation should have continued for so many years. The various tribes who in the reign of Louis the German and later made up the German empire, saw each one in itself the highest pohtical union which it would be wise to achieve. They hated to assume restraining ties, or for the sake of unity to renounce any of their arbitrary rights. The German tribal dukes and later the territorial princes would not have been able to fight successfuUy against the idea of a united Germany, if they had not been the exponents of deeply rooted impulses; impulses which sought the satisfaction of independent political instincts in separation and in victories over the attempts at a compulsory union. The heroic history and the sorrows of the German nation offer comprehensive evidence of the destructive force of this tendency which unfortu/- nately has been innate from the past to the present. We discover that this desire to flock in independent groups has not left us, but has simply shifted its mode of expression. The machinery of party-politics of modern Germany, the social divisions of the nation, the distinctly German habit of recognizing classes and castes, these are the ways in which that old spirit shows itself today, and here it eats up in aimless quarrels and fruitless friction much of our national strength. Why were the people aU about us generaUy stronger OBSTRUCTIONS FROM WITHIN 41 than we although we were more numerous than any of them and more gifted than most of them? Largely because they understood how to subordinate the forces which made for separation to those which made foi union. This is the whole art of developing poUtical power. We, however, have permitted a pecuUarity oi our character to work havoc with our opportunities. We have suffered dire psychological effects from the de cline of our culture and wealth and pride since the first great reUgious war to the foundation of the new empire. Is it astonishing, therefore, that the strength which had survived the cleavage turned into a cari cature, and the heroic became the grotesque, and the natural instincts were transformed into something ridiculous? We suffer even today, more than most people think. from the deformity of our national pride. In spite oi many big words concerning the German nation, its rights and its dignity, the national pride of the average German refers primarily to his class or caste or to his rank and profession; in short to a certain group within the nation, and only secondarily to the national idea itself. No loud-sounding phrases uttered at officiahj patriotic or other occasions, can alter this fact. As long as one German regards another German as of less worth because he has a lower title, or was not electee in coUege to a certain society, or possesses no specific 42 GERMAN WORLD POLICIES qualifications for this or that, just so long must a very quafified worth be attached to all patriotic speeches. A national feeling which divides its own people into groups of greater or less worth is not sincere. Of course, no reasonable person will claim that every German has this defect clearly defined in his makeup, but equally honestly it must be confessed that a lean ing in this direction is characteristic of the average German, and the more so the higher his social position is. The rise from the lower to the upper classes means with us Uttle more than bottling oneself up in one of the special professions which the upper and the middle classes have divided between them. There are un fortunately only a few Germans whose national feeling is so strong that any profession seems too smaU for them. For most the horizon of their solidarity with a group is as far as they can see, and anything of a general national idea beyond that is at best only an imaginary force for them. Consequently the special interests of a group loom up larger to most people than the national idea itself. And if they think at aU of the relationship of these two kinds of interest, they rarely escape the error of self-deception, believing that the fatherland is best served by their complete sub mission to party rule and party interests. This self-characterization may seem offensive and unnecessary to many who will ask whether conditions OBSTRUCTIONS FROM WITHIN 43 are not even worse elsewhere. They are, but none of the dangerous social abuses in France, Russia, and Eng land exhibit, as they do in Germany, the one particu larly harmful trait, contempt of one's fellow-country men merely because they belong to classes of less ex- clusiveness. In Germany this trait, which is growing rather than waning, prevents the people from realizing that aU groups are in duty bound to work together for the national idea. Our shriveled-up moral conscience in this respect is the result of the wretched existence which we were forced to lead through three centuries. During this time our character could not work off its morbid traits and was, therefore, most injuriously af fected by them. The French experienced under the reign of Louis XIV and his successors a division into a small upper crust, whose representatives thought they had superior rights, and the lower classes who had no social rights at all. Because the upper classes lacked the sense of unity with the masses and of responsibility for them, the revolution had to occur. Said the abbe Sieyes: "What does the third class today signify? Nothing! What is the third class? Everything, for it is the nation." These words, with which he sharply denned the problem of the revolution, remained the guiding star of the whole turmoil which enabled the French to escape from intolerable conditions. But the revolution has deprived 44 GERMAN WORLD POLICIES France of the continuity of her historic development, for since the masses, with their terrific acts of violence, have broken through the barriers of the classes, the nation has been unable to regain its equilibrium. It has fafied to estabhsh within its democratic repubUc that authority which every government must exercise over the anarchistic instincts of her masses. The proc esses of social disintegration in France are, therefore, not so much the results of a national disease as of a bad form of government. Even in Russia there yawns an abyss dividing the people into two strata which have hardly any connec tion with each other, the peasants and the educated people. The latter, someone has said, are the bearers of culture, the former its supporters without coming into hving contact with it. We have here undoubtedly one of the most fateful moments of the Russian poUtical and moral weakness, and it is not necessary to speak in detaU of the well-known brutality which often char acterizes the relations between high and low, between those who have the power and those who lack it. But in spite of aU this, the relations of the members of the various classes to each jother are more natural than with us, for they are almost entirely free of that social exclusiveness which practically denies the unity of the national idea. As regards the EngUsh, they are unsurpassed by OBSTRUCTIONS FROM WITHIN 45 any people in their commonsense understanding of the fact that good pohtics and good social conditions de pend on the healthy adjustment of those who lead to those who are led. With aU the EngUsh feeling for social distinctions, the German system of groups of greater or less individual worth could never gain any headway in England. Snobbishness, as the EngUsh man caUs it, is not the same as our pride of caste. Grant ing even that a bit of this may once have existed in England, it is perfectly apparent that today the ten dencies there are in favor of giving to the masses greater power in poUtical matters. In this way the last rem nants of a former exclusiveness are rapidly disappearing. In answer to aU this it may be said that it was in Germany, nevertheless, where those who govern first felt their responsibihty to those who were governed, and manifested it in the finest possible way, in the legislation for the benefit of the old, the sick and the wounded. This is true, but it does not lessen the fact that class hatred is greater with us than anywhere else, and that the sense of social distinctions has actuaUy carried off the victory over the national idea only among the German SociaUsts. : , TheoreticaUy the Social ists everywhere should be internationaUy minded, and 1 [The strong national feeling of all the Socialists of Europe including those of Germany was a surprise at the outbreak of the war. Translator.] 46 GERMAN WORLD POLICIES forget as much as possible the Umitations of fatherland and race. Actually, however, they have forgotten them only in Germany. Why is this? Is it only because our SociaUsts are Germans, and as such value the interests of special factions higher than those of the nation? No, it happens also for another reason, and probably especiaUy for this other reason, because the feeUng of caste of the upper classes has brought to bear on the struggle for freedom of the lower classes that element of deadly hatred which elsewhere is confined to the wild,/ really lawless and unpatriotic anarchists who are the dregs of society. We claimed above that the social divisions with us were growing stronger. If anyone feels inchned to deny this, let him enquire whether the upper classes are growing to understand better or to understand less the modes of thought, the needs, and the general condi tion of the masses. No one who has given this problem any thought can be at a loss for an answer/ Some wiU say, the fault Ues with the unpractical classical educa tion in our upper schools. In England and in America, where a more sensible curriculum exists, the people understand each other better. This explanation is wrong, because the classics were even more prominent in the education of our grandparents, while today a mass of more practical studies has been added. Others claim that the present system of easy communication has OBSTRUCTIONS FROM WITHIN 47 uprooted the people. The lower strata have been placed into a flux and flow away from the country into the large cities, and the leaders and contractors, the officials and manufacturers, the professional men, mer chants and technicians — all are whirUng along, able to change from place to place and to practice their profes sions or their trade wherever chance or mood has drifted them. Formerly, when the present ease of change did not exist, people remained more closely together, all in the place of their fathers, and one class in touch with every other. Today the railroad hurls the people from one end of the empire to the other end, and people begin their work in places where there is\io familiarity between the old inhabitants and the new-comers. From- the country districts in the East people rush into the industrial world of the West. Factories, banks, and stores in thousands of country towns are directed by means of the telegraph or the telephone from a, few central stations. People unknown in the locahty are at the head of the local institutions. Corporations in stead of actual, hving people monopoUze the commerce of the land, and the destructive influence of the modern press adds the last touch to the disappearance of the feeUng of belonging anywhere in particular. Under such conditions, how can there be a mutual understand ing among the various classes? One or the other of such complaints may pass, but 48 GERMAN WORLD POLICIES to grant them in toto would be equivalent to confess ing that our people are less able to meet the demands of a new epoch of culture than the other nations are. Why has the age of the raUroad and the machine im proved the relations between the classes in England where they did not use to be of the best? Not only the material welfare of the laborer but also his under standing of the national idea has improved, whUe the broadened foundations of the EngUsh constitution have resulted in a much stronger devotion to the ideas of political and social oneness. The cultural Ufe in Eng land, moreover, is today as compared with the age which knew no railroads, in a far greater process of revolution than it is in Germany. It is wrong, therefore, to blame the altered conditions instead of the nation itseff which is unable to render such changes from accustomed con ditions harmless by the exercise of its moral energies. There is no doubt that it is more difficult for the upper classes today to keep in touch with the others than it used to be. We see that success is made the rule, more or less openly, by the so-caUed governing classes. And success for them is nothing more nor less than the en trance of privilege into the world at large. To main tain themselves successfully and to rise to positions of stUl larger incomes, authority and influence is aU that counts for them. From this point of view the people no longer are the original soil in which every individual OBSTRUCTIONS FROM WITHIN 4 existence has its roots, for they are looked upon as strange and soulless field which can be worked by cole blooded schemers. Everything is subject to succes; not only the schemer's emotions but also his thoughts People who struggle to reach ever higher rounds of th social ladder and dream of breaking into more and mor exclusive sets, lose every sense of being answerable together with their fellow-countrymen, to the demand of the national idea. The result is schematic-reasoning The very principle that every thinking individual en joys moral autonomy, is swaUowed up in the thought less hypnosis of the judgment of that particular clas to which one belongs or wishes to belong. Under these conditions it is natural that a progres sive pruning of independent personaUties must tak place in positions where submission to predetermine* forms of thought and action is necessary for success Elsewhere we shall describe what happens to our politica Ufe from this source. But everything we have thus fa said about the unsatisfactory development of our inter nal conditions is the necessary result of the defect o the German character which we described above as i Umitation of our national instinct. This defect, whicl is ours by nature, has been made so much worse by th< historical miseries through which we have passed, tha we must feel considerable anxiety in contemplating the future of the German idea. Our anxiety grows stil 50 GERMAN WORLD POLICIES greater, when we realize that this weakness of our na tional instinct in internal affairs is coupled with an equally dangerous insufficiency of thought. in foreign affairs. Faults of instinct and faults due to the long external pressure which we have suffered go hand in hand also here. The strength. with which a people gives effect to its national idea in the world depends not only on the sum of its physical and mental forces, but also on its vivid consciousness of the old word of wisdom that struggle is the father of things. Immediately connected with this is the instinctive interest in the world about us, not only from the point of view of primitive curiosity or objective science, but from the point of view of poUt ical comprehension. The national idea can take a successful flight into space only where such a participa tion exists. A great people must feel the need of seeing everything that happens in the world in the mirror of its own na tional interest. We Germans, however, lack too com pletely the realization that conditions and events, not only nearby but also across the ocean, have to do with our own national affairs. For every EngUshman the conviction is natural that every happening in this world — in whatever state and among whatever people — has an immediate bearing upon English interests, and must, therefore, be thus regarded, influenced or corrected. OBSTRUCTIONS FROM WITHIN 5 1 \n English statesman once said that no shot should be ired anywhere on the seas without the permission of England. Today this maxim may be enlarged from ie point of view of EngUsh pohtics to include not only ie seas but also the lands, for both should be subject to ;ontrol according to the wishes and the needs of Eng- and. We Germans are indignant at this EngUsh a'rro- *ance. But there is no cause for such indignation. IVhat the Enghshmen show is not arrogance in the noral sense of the word, for this can only exist where lie claim is not justified. No one, however, who knows he EngUsh world empire can deny that an immense imount of national moral strength and virtue was leeded to build it. It is natural that many EngUsh )rocedures have been and still are decidedly human. This is true of every great empire, for it is a pecuUarity )f all human things that no great idea can be realized ree from imperfection and violence. It is the control- ing motives of a poUtical organism which count, and t would be more than foUy to claim that avarice, deceit, md violence are the fundamental motives of the Eng- ish empire. It is natural that he who has founded for rimself a world of Uving interests, as great as the actual ' rorld in which we hve, should increasingly endeavor o secure and broaden its foundations. We cannot ;rant that the preservation of seme small and insignif- cant nationaUty as a poUtical unit is as important for 52 GERMAN WORLD POLICIES the development of mankind as the growth of those world nations who are the standard bearers of culture. In future the smaller people will have only the choice to decide with which one of the big nations they wiU voluntarily combine, or to which one of them their geographical position wiU commit them. If a nation wishes to maintain itself as an independent entity by the side of such a gigantic power and culture as the EngUsh, and take part in the shaping of the culture of the world, it is obhged to prove by its deeds that it has a right to such a claim. The limits of England are not the Himalaya Mountains or the Antarctic Sea, but the places where other nations are strong enough to unfurl the flags of their own ideas. We shquld, there fore, not accuse England of arrogance, but see to it that what we call arrogance, may become as truly a part of the German idea as it is a part of the EngUsh idea. What in short is our real misfortune in foreign af fairs? That there are so few of us to whom our na tional instinct teUs how "arrogant" we may and should already be. Why are the EngUsh arrogant? Because they know how they exist and by what means. They cannot afford to lack connections with any part of the worjd, if they are to maintain their national Ufe at their present high level. They too are subject to the law that the hfe of a nation knows no standstill, but OBSTRUCTIONS FROM WITHIN 53 only rise or fall. The English people do not increase so fast as we only by about half a miUion people annually, and they number at present twenty miUion people less than we. If it is necessary for them to expand for the sake of self-preservation, it is much more necessary for us. Granted that today not only the percentage but also the actual number of people dependent on foreign commerce is greater in England than in Germany, how much longer can it be till we are where the English are today? We number sixty-seven million. Let us sup pose that under the existing conditions of Germany and England, two-thirds of our people and one-third of theirs are able to exist without the transatlantic commerce, we should then have reached within the space of half a generation the state where only half of us can thus exist. That will be the time when our boys who are in school now wiU enter Ufe as trained men. The space of time under discussion is so brief that it may be called but a moment in the life of a people, and after another generation twice as many Germans will get their bread from abroad as can get it from the German soil. We should know all this! And yet we show an in difference to the things of the world at large, as if only foreign interests and not our own were at stake in dis tant lands. Most Germans confine their interests to the same small circle of poUtical events as their grand fathers and greatgrandfathers to the people in their 54 GERMAN WORLD POLICIES immediate neighborhood, with whom they have fought and made peace for centuries. Our actual knowledge, moreover, and conception of even these neighboring lands are generally very imperfect. Possibly one is right in saying that England and France know even less of Germany than we know of them. If this is so conditions may arise when this wiU be fatal for them, but we cannot see why we should voluntarily copy their ignorance. When it comes to poUtical or social occur rences in farthest Asia, Persia, Turkey, South America, or elsewhere on the shores of the Pacific, what is the attitude of the ordinary German? If he thinks any thing at all, it is that those happenings are terribly far away, and, thank heaven, do not concern us; or if mat ters should concern us, the government wUl take care of them; and finally, it is a pleasure to be a spectator and curse the EngUsh who mix everywhere in matters which do not concern them. This is the way which will sometime, and in no great distant future, deprive us of our inheritance in the world if we do not change. Ger mans who think along such lines do not realize that the incredibly rapid growth of the inter-communication of the world during the past forty or fifty years has so completely shaken up all former poUtical and economic conditions, that their effect on the various peoples and their culture has grown enormously. To a certain ex tent we know this, but we do not know that the hun- OBSTRUCTIONS FROM WITHIN 55 dreds of thousands of steamers which have passed through the Suez canal since it was first opened, that the mUhard telegrams which have been sent across the oceans, that the uncountable hordes of people who, in modern conveyances, have crossed the seas and the lands, mean more than the mere numbers in statistical records. We should see in them the imaginations and thoughts, the plans and passions of people, and of chang ing worlds. They have touched, influenced, and per meated each other. They have created new industries, new commercial values, new needs, and above every thing else new spiritual connections. AU of this is perfectly apparent, if we focus our attention for in stance on the Chinese revolution and the changes in Turkey. One of the best German scholars of Chinese affairs has rightly said that the happenings in China a few years ago amounted to the passing of a world. The old culture of a people which had lasted four thou sand years, and had embraced half of all mankind when America was discovered, and still numbers more than one-quarter, has begun to come to terms with the western civUization in a crisis of gigantic dimensions. No one can foretell the effects of this event on the development of the human race, beyond saying that they will be tremendous. The poUtical and miUtary reformation of Turkey also means for the three hundred miUion adherents of Islam 56 GERMAN WORLD POLICIES nothing less than the beginning of a crisis in their entire systems of culture and rehgion. The Young Turks are endeavoring to modernize their state, or in other words to adjust the law, the customs, and the culture of a Mohammedan community to the concessions which it must make to western culture, if it wishes to maintain its poUtical independence. Only a bUnd man can be- Ueve that the struggle between the different worlds of ideas which ensue in Turkey will not also react on the remaining adherents of Islam. It is the duty of poUtical reason to recognize in the very beginning of a movement the amount of actual possibihties which may result from its progress. It is quite possible that results of the present Turkish crisis on three continents wiU be as momentous as those emanating from China. Another huge portion of mankind has come into contact with western civilization in India. Indian un rest, which occasions the EngUsh great concern, is the beginning of a process of transformation in a world of hundreds of miUions of people. They have Uved an independent spiritual life since their history began, es- tabUshing pecuhar forms of thoughts and principles of Ufe, and recently through the effects of our imported civiUzation have commenced to undergo a process of spiritual fermentation. For the last two decades the call has sounded from the Enghsh-Indian world "India for the Indians," first indistinctly, and then louder and OBSTRUCTIONS FROM WITHIN 57 louder. It was occasioned by a western people gov erning India, and spreading ideas which graduaUy took root in the very depths of the Indian character, until at last the rudiments of a complete upheaval were achieved. The last of the great modern problems of the world and of mankind are found in the African race. Only during the last two or three decades has it become pos sible to speak of the white and the black portions of mankind as having come into far-reaching communica tions with each other. The great raUway hnes are still unfinished which wiU penetrate from the coasts to the very interior of the African continent, and bring the fairly populous parts of Africa with independent negro civilizations under the influence of the Europeans. The race problem is one of the most difficult, and is more difficult in Africa than elsewhere. We can at present only dimly guess what the effect will be, when such a tremendous amount of physical force as is represented by the one hundred or one hundred and fifty milhons of negroes, whose spiritual potentiahties are inferior to ours, is forcefuUy set in motion, compelled to serve, then revolts, and finally is inherently altered. But it is certain that the disturbances which wiU arise from this quarter wiU send their waves out and on to the rest of the world. It is the expansion of the commerce of the world and that indescribably big movement of men, goods, and 58 GERMAN WORLD POLICIES thoughts of which we spoke above, which have ushered in this new epoch of development in the culture of mankind. But what does the average German know of these things? Has he even an inkling that the future of the German national idea is bound up with these struggles in the world today? It is not European cul ture in the abstract which is thrown into the huge smelters in the corners of the world, but national cul ture — and most especiaUy Anglo-Saxon culture. The proud words of the Britons, "The world rapidly grows EngUsh," receive their fuU meaning only when we realize the tremendous participation of EngUsh culture in the shaping of the culture of the World. For every English man this is a self-evident part of his national conscious ness. No charge is more frequently made against the Enghsh than that of hypocrisy. People say that it is hypocrisy when the EngUsh claim that the absorption of a foreign part into their empire amounts to an ex tension of civilization, and consider their own Anglo- Saxon culture the highest type of human moraUty. The other great cultural nations will deny the later claim, but who can deny that Enghsh culture is the most powerful, weU-knit and efficient type into which a national idea has been able to develop since the Roman empire? Where is there today any accomphshment that can show its face by the side of what the EngUsh people are doing to influence the rest of mankind along OBSTRUCTIONS FROM WITHIN 59 poUtical and cultural lines? Of all creative forces at work among nations the grandest and the noblest is that of forming states, for every other achievement of a people, however great, is doomed to perish, unless the parent country is able to create a sustaining power in the shape of a great state, or unless the governmental organism of another people absorbs the created values and gives them effect and Ufe along big lines. The EngUsh empire as the creation of the EngUsh idea and as the bearer and disseminator of this idea in the world is a thing of such grandeur that one cannot speak of it except with admiration. If we omit Anglo- Saxon America, which is, culturally speaking, almost a unit with England, the desire to maintain oneself by the side of England, and to force her acknowledgment of one's joint control of the culture of the world, is so very bold, considering her lead in the world, that it must be backed by the fiercest determination. Whether a nation has such a determination, depends on the quickness with which it recognizes its proper aim, and its readiness to make sacrifices for it. How does it get such recognition? By school-education? Surely not. The EngUsh school geography is probably much worse than ours; but what every EngUshman knows, and what the German does not know, is that the world is there for the express purpose of being the sphere of expansion, not only for one's ships and goods, but for one's national 60 GERMAN WORLD POLICIES idea. And what is the meaning of sacrifices? Is it the penny, collected with difficulty, for the society for the preservation of the German character in foreign lands? Or is it the concession of a few more regiments and ships, bartered for and discussed in parhament? Surely not. This kind of coUective sacrifice amounts, if worse comes to worse, only to a sUght increase in taxes, which every party is endeavoring to push off on every other party. It is, therefore, of no moral value compared with the sacrifice which each German may make from his own property to the national idea. Again we must point to the example of England. The nobility of the EngUsh point of view shows best in the way in which the EngUshman considers it natural that he should place a part of his resources and of his strength at the disposal of the national idea. In England it is not only nominally but also actuaUy the noble duty of every rich private individual, merchant, banker, and shipowner to place considerable sums at the disposal of those who are working for the expansion of the Anglo-Saxon in fluence across the sea. The amounts spent in this con nection along pohtical and cultural Unes are enormous. The two EngUsh Chinese High Schools, for instance, which are maintained in China in order to make the EngUsh influence authoritative for the Chinese govern ment and its civilization, cost ten miUion marks. One- quarter of this sum is drawn from the United States and OBSTRUCTIONS FROM WITHIN 6l Canada, and another small part contributed by EngUsh- friendly Chinese merchants. By far the greater part, however, is defrayed from voluntary gifts by the Enghsh people. It is natural that at such occasions an appeal should also be made to the material interests of the individual donors, for it is desired that the money shall pay for itself by an increased commerce. The important things, however, are the readiness of the individual to do something for the interests of all, and the breadth of vision which does not sordidly expect returns with interest within a year or two, but is accustomed and ready to discount the future. In addition there is the freedom from prejudice which characterizes the Anglo- Saxon whenever the national interests are at stake. Even those who think Uttle or nothing at all of the re sults of Christian missionary work among the non- Christian people, actively support the English mission aries, wherever they are, because they know that the EngUsh missionary work needs must foster EngUsh culture and the Anglo-Saxon idea. The EngUsh mission is of such a magnitude that no one who has not seen it at work can have an idea of its extensive and intensive national importance; and the enormous sums spent by it are largely contributed by people whose religious sym pathies are greatly inferior to their national interests. UWe Germans have to confess that our insight, sense j {of responsibihty and cheerfulness in making personal 62 GERMAN WORLD POLICIES sacrifices for the sake of our national idea in the world, are as yet very undeveloped, and exceedmgly smaU compared with those of the EngUsh. This must be said in spite of the fact that recently considerable sums have been contributed by large commercial houses for a national propaganda in foreign lands. That this en terprise was crowned with success was largely due to the exercise of official, or at least partly official au thority. For such an authority our big interests are as yet more open than similar interests are elsewhere. If it should cease, then the popular achievements along these lines would faU in Germany below zero. We do not mean to say that there are no men in Germany who recognize what is needed, and who work for it zealously — but the actual result is overwhehriingly smaU. The smaU amount of ideaUsm — it might be more correct to speak of ideal reaUsm — which is at our disposal for the expansion of the German idea in the world, is to be credited almost whoUy to a Uttle group of educated people who are blessed with more spiritual than ma terial goods. Beneath them there yawns an infinite and dark void, and above them only an occasional gUmmer of Ught is seen. The famous union of culture and wealth which in England defrays the expenses of strengthening the national idea is almost wholly lacking in Germany. Our rich people, generally speaking, cannot claim to be educated in the far-reaching relations of national ideas. OBSTRUCTIONS FROM WITHIN 63 The exceptions are white elephants. It makes no dif ference whether we think of our high nobiUty, both Protestant and CathoUc, with its large holdings of real estate and growing participation in the proceeds of modern capitaUstic enterprises, or of our industrial princes, bankers, or other money-kings, — almost every where we meet crass ignorance, indifference, or even open opposition to any progressive interest in an in vigorated national idea outside the narrow confines of Germany. It is incredible, but it is a fact that there are German financial institutions of world renown which resolutely decline, in the interest of their business, to do anything for the operation of the German idea in the world, even within the spheres of their immediate in fluence. They even intentionally diminish for the sake of their commercial interests the force of the German idea, which naturaUy would emanate from their busi ness activities, by appointing to influential positions foreigners and even those who are hostile to the German idea. For an EngUshman such a sin against the sanctity of the national idea Ues outside the sphere of the possible. As our people are, so is our government. The Bible truly says that every tree can bring forth fruit only of its own kind. Is there another nation in the world whose government would have been wiUing through forty years to let hundreds of thousands of fellow- countrymen Uving in foreign lands lose their nationaUty 64 GERMAN WORLD POLICIES simply because it could not find a formula by which they might be retained. Was it not a shame for the Germans that their mother country, although it had at last found its union, no longer cared for them, if for ten years they had not visited the sacred halls of a German consulate? Quod non est in actis non est in mundo, What is not in the records does not exist in the world. This proverb in Latin garb expresses the awful spirit of our bureaucrats who have no regard for the value of national possessions. A nation, like the ItaUan, half our size, spends on its national schools outside of Italy the sum of from fifteen to twenty miUion francs annuaUy, which is mag nificent considering its circumstances. Crispi himself had this item for the "scuole regie nel estero," the royal school in foreign lands, entered in the budget at a time when the financial condition of the country was far from being exceUent. One is ashamed to name by the side of this sum the beggarly penny which the "great" German empire grants for simUar purposes under aU kinds of bashfuUy hidden titles. If one listens to men of influence in our government and parhament, even this amount is a gratifying, almost far-seeing augmenta tion of the "funds available for the national idea," as the official phrase reads. How could this be different, for the same human beings who as young men and as students heard nothing of the connection of distant hap- OBSTRUCTIONS FROM WITHIN 65 penings with the needs of our national idea and of the acuteness of the crisis — neither in their parents' house, nor in school nor in the university — they are the ones who now in the legislature or in official positions have to produce the ideas or to pass on the suggestions by which the German idea in the world is to be advanced. Can one gather grapes from a thorn-bush or figs from thistles? The natural breadth which every great nation gives to the expansion of its national culture, the energy of its national instinct, and the determination to com prehend the meaning of every happening in its bearing on its own national interests, these three important factors have always been too little prominent with the Germans. And what Uttle they once had of them they have lost in those centuries when the thorns and thistles of national pauperism grew on their fields instead of the noble wines of a national idea. Our leading classes, the so-caUed educated and well-to-do classes, are spiritually mere paupers when the national idea commandingly caUs to them: "Increase me and fiU the world with me, and make it subject tome!" CHAPTER III EXTERNAL FOUNDATIONS OF THE NATIONAL IDEA •^No strong national existence is possible without a sufficiently broad local basis. During the first years of their known history the Germans occupied a much greater part of Europe than they owned later. Toward the west and south their expansion met resistance for a long time, in the fortified boundaries of the Roman empire on the Rhine and the Danube. But toward the East, their abodes or at least their sphere of pohtical influence, extended far into what today is Russia. When in the middle of the third century the Goths sailed across the Pontus and pressed south through the Thracian sea to plunder Athens and the temple of Diana at Ephe- sus, their dominion reached from the modern East Germany to far beyond the Carpathian mountains; and a hundred years later, under Hermanrick, the em pire of the Goths extended from the Theiss to the Don and from the Baltic Sea to the Black Sea. During the migration of nations the Germans yielded not only these territories to the Slavs and the Mongolian tribes pressing forward on their way from the interior of Asia, but vacated also the whole eastern part of the original 66 EXTERNAL FOUNDATIONS OF THE NATIONAL IDEA 67 Germany. German princes ruled in Italy, Gaul, Spain, and Africa, but the mother country of the Germans had shriveled until it included only the narrow strip between the Elbe and the Maes. In the time of Charle magne the boundary between the Germans and the Slavs ran approximately from Kiel to Niirnberg. Grad uaUy a counter movement of the Germans took place, and conquering and colonizing, they reached in the South almost to the further end of the Eastern Alps, and in the East to beyond the Oder. Of the valley of the Vistula only the lower part was regained, while all else remained with the Poles. Also in the South the process of re-Germanization penetrated Uttle beyond the outer edge of Bohemia, the center of which re mained in the possession of the Tschechs. Thus the unfortunate eastern boundary Une of people and lan guage came about with its many recesses and sharp angles, which has compelled us to enclose a bit of Poland within our confines. It is wrong to assume, as people used to do, that the gradual re-Germanization of the people east of the Elbe and the Saale was due to the extermination of the Slavish tribes, who had settled there. On the contrary, it was the result of a compre hensive blood mixture of the conquered with the con querors. East Germany enjoys a purely German cul ture but its inhabitants are a mixed race of Germans and Slavs. This fact has been very important for the 68 GERMAN WORLD POLICIES German history, for in the East the centrifugal forces of the original German character, — the tendencies of which are destructive of national unity — were aUoyed with Slavish quahties. These supphed the pohtical and social pUabiUty which made the formation of a strong monarchy possible. And this monarchy was powerful enough to assume the leadership over the greater part of Germany. The Germans Who have thus achieved political union inhabit a country of moderate natural worth. Ger many cannot be compared with France or the Donau regions as regards fertiUty, climate, or mineral wealth. Its fertiUty is mediocre, as we all know. Of those raw materials, which are necessary for the possession of a lucrative share in the world's commerce, we have enough iron and other metals, but httle else. We have already seen that foodstuffs have to be imported in large quan tities to satisfy our present population. The greater part of our industry also can only exist if its needed materials are imported: cotton, wool, silk, and other fibres, the precious metals, copper, wood, skins, rubber, and mineral and vegetable oils. England and France, on the contrary, can supply from their transatlantic possessions whatever they lack themselves, and such gigantic states as Russia and the United States are capable of an autonomous existence within their own boundaries. EXTERNAL FOUNDATIONS OF THE NATIONAL IDEA 69 Our position in respect to the former world traffic was exceUent until the great transoceanic way was dis covered. On the two great commercial routes south and north, and east and west which led through Ger many, and on our two seas, goods used to be moved in as large quantities as in any other part of the world. But since the commerce among people has more and more developed into one of distance, conditions have become less favorable for us. England is much more favorably situated on the open ocean than we are. The political secession, moreover, of the Netherlands has diminished the German coast line along the North Sea by more than half of its former extent. We communi cate directly with the ocean only through the narrow bay into which the Elbe and the Weser empty their waters, and beyond it lie as a powerful bar the British Isles. If the English prohibit our passage along their coasts, we are caught in a trap. How much freer is the coast of France on the ocean itself! How much shorter for the transatlantic trade the way to Bordeaux or Bristol than to Hamburg, or, even more, Stettin or Konigsberg! Added to aU these disadvantages is an other weighty one — at least we are at first sight tempted to caU it so. No European world power has such an extent of frontiers unprotected by nature herself as Germany. England is the most complete natural fortress of 70 GERMAN WORLD POLICIES Europe. Italy, Spain, and France are also surrounded by seas and mountains. What a contrast with Ger many, which is placed openly in the midst of the most powerful peoples of Europe! In spite of these checks we see that the material side of Germany has developed, since its recent union, with a might which seems akin to the elementary forces of nature. The most important factor is our numerical increase, which must be mentioned over and over again as the leading consideration of our discussion. It is the very foundation of our social Ufe. Without it we could not have grown to be nearly what we are today, and without it we could never hope for a development strong enough to make the German idea a power in the world. We should, therefore, not shrink from a thought ful study of the actual figures of this growth. Only when its grandeur is present within us as an actuality, shaU we be able to continue our investigation on firm ground. The first thing we need is a survey of the figures in which our growth is expressed. Unfortunately no re- Uable census of our population antedates 1816, when the inhabitants of what is modern Germany today numbered less than twenty-five miUion. Forty years later, in 1855, there were thirty-six milUon, so that the annual increase was 275,000. The next fifteen years, down to the Franco-Prussian War, brought an increase EXTERNAL FOUNDATIONS OF THE NATIONAL LDEA 7 1 of about four miUions, or an annual average of only 260,000. Considering the relation to the total population, the latter increase was much less than it had been earUer in the century. In other words, the population of Ger many grew annuaUy from the War of Liberation to the foundation of the empire, from twenty-five miUions to about forty miUions, but the rapidity of the increase grew less as time advanced. To double the original twenty-five miUions seventy-seven years were needed, for the fifty miUion mark was not reached until 1893, or reaUy eighty years, if one omits the considerable ad dition of the population of Alsace-Lorraine. Starting now with 187 1, when the population of Germany, after the annexation of Alsace-Lorraine was about forty-one miUions, and estimating according to the annual increase since then, the approximate doubling of this figure to eighty miUions may be expected between 1925 and 1930. This means after only about sixty years! Several things should be noted in connection with this figure. There was, in the first place, a noticeable loss due to emigration down to the year 1890. In the thirty years from 1841 to 1870 this loss amounted to about two and one-half miUion people; in the next forty years to only about as much. If we remember that far fewer people hved in Germany from 1841 to 1870 than between 1870 and 1910, we realize that the loss by emi gration was much greater before the foundation of the 72 GERMAN WORLD POLICLES empire than since. We must also remember that the number of emigrants was very large in the first years after 1870, when the economic progress of Germany wliich we experience today was in a process of prepara tion. It averaged annuaUy one hundred thousand people and occasionaUy exceeded two hundred thou sand. It did not begin to fall persistently until 1893, while at present the annual emigrants number only between twenty and thirty thousand. This figure is less than our annual increase by immigration. Another weighty consideration should not be forgotten. Ger many was a grain-exporting country up to the middle of the eighties of the last century, but in spite of it failed to offer a sufficient scope of UveUhood to its increasing population. Since then a constantly growing part of our people has been dependent on bread not grown in Germany, but Germany nevertheless supports the growing population more easily now than before. From 1 88 1 to 1885 the average annual loss by emigration was two hundred thousand, from 1906 to 1910 it was only shghtly more than one- tenth of this figure. Secondly, the mode of the increase should be con sidered in detail. The annual increase is due to the excess of births over deaths. To a certain extent, there fore, a low birth rate may be corrected by favorable sanitary conditions, i. e., by a low death rate. In Russia the birth rate per thousand inhabitants is very high, EXTERNAL FOUNDATIONS OF THE NATIONAL LDEA 73 but since the death rate is also enormous, her rate of increase is only slightly in advance of that of Germany. In France, on the other hand, the seeming standstill of the population would long have changed to a de crease, if the death rate had not been constantly di minished. Even with the greatest perfection of sanita tion the time must come when death claims its own, but the amount snatched from death during the last dec ades is far greater than one generaUy assumes. In 1875 Germany had forty-two and one-half milUon in habitants. Of these one and one-fourth milUon died in that year, or twenty-nine and three-tenths per thou sand. In 1910 the German population was sixty-five miUions, or an increase of twenty-two and five-tenths milUons, but the population, which had increased by fuUy one-third, lost by death only one and two-tenths miUion people, or nineteen per thousand. During the decade from 1900 to 1910 fewer people died in Ger many than between 1870 and 1880, in spite of the enor mous increase in population. The growing prosperity and better education, sewers, hygiene, and the labor of the physicians have caUed a powerful halt to the rav ages of death. In some years death tried to gain a point, but on the whole it has been retarded. Insurance against sickness, old age, and accidents, homes for in fants, and the protection granted to mothers miUtate against it. 74 GERMAN WORLD POLICIES In the year 1855 the birth rate in Germany was thirty- three and five-tenths per thousand and the death rate twenty-nine and four-tenths. The natural increase, there fore, was four and one-tenth per thousand, or altogether one hundred forty-seven thousand. In 1875 the birth rate had gained about ten, forty-two and three- tenths per thousand, while the death rate had remained twenty-nine and three-tenths. The increase of births, therefore, swelled the total increase, even without a decrease in the death rate, from four and one-tenth to thirteen per thou sand, i. e., five hundred and fifty- two thousand in this one year. It may almost seem as if the highest physical creative power of the people had been reached in the years im mediately after the foundation of the empire, for the figure forty-two and three-tenths per thousand indicates the zenith of the curve. Since then the excess of births over deaths has been maintained, reaching its maximum in 1906 with nine hundred and ten thousand people, but this growth is no longer due to an advancing birth rate, but to a rapidly decreasing death rate. As a mat ter of fact the birth rate has fallen from 1875, when it was forty-two and three-tenths per thousand, to 1909, when it was thirty-one and nine-tenths per thousand, or almost by one-fourth of its former height. Since 1907 the impairment of the birth rate shows more than the improvement of the death rate. In 1906 the Ger- EXTERNAL FOUNDATIONS OF THE NATIONAL IDEA 75 man growth of population reached its climax, and was nine hundred and ten thousand; in 1907 it was eight hundred and eighty-three thousand, one year later eight hundred and eighty thousand, and in 1909, the last year of which complete statistics are at hand, again eight hundred and eighty-four thousand. Also the number of marriages is decreasing, in spite of the absolute increase of population. There were per thousand inhabitants Marriages Deaths Births Increase 1906 8.2 19.2 34.1 14.9 1907 8.1 19.0 33.2 14.2 1908 7-9 190 33.0 14.0 I9°9 7-9 18. 1 31.9 13.8 Let us investigate these figures more closely. If we look at the second column, the death rate, we see the continued confirmation of Naumann's statement that the death rate of the last fifty years is a bright page in the history of mankind — step by step death has been thrown back. But what shall we say of the fact that the number of marriages and of births has been con stantly decreasing in a period of decided material pros perity? If we study only the figures of the last year, it would seem as if at least the fertiUty of the German marriages did not diminish, but a comparison with a period not far distant teaches another conclusion. Dur ing the decade from 1892 to 1902 the number of mar- 76 GERMAN WORLD POLICIES riages per thousand was eight and two-tenths, and the birth rate thirty-seven and two-tenths. For every mar riage, therefore, there were four and five-tenths births. From 1906 to 1909 the average annual marriages were eight per thousand, with only four and one-tenth aver age births for each marriage. If we look only on the last year which offers full statistics, 1909, the propor tion remains the same. Both factors, the diminished frequency of marriages and the lowered birth rate, account for the slowing up of the annual increase of the total population. Where ten years ago one thou sand marriages were recorded and forty-five hundred children were born, there are today only nine hundred and forty-eight marriages and thirty-eight hundred and fifty births. This correction in our picture of the increase of the German population was needed to direct our attention in time to the fact that a worm has already begun to gnaw in the very marrow of our growth. As yet, we excel by far all the other world powers. Russia shghtly outstrips us in the rate of her growth, while the Nether lands and Scandinavia are close seconds. Austria- Hungary, England, and Italy grow at a rate a fifth smaller than our own. France is standing still, for her occasional seeming increase is due to immigration. For the next two decades our slower growth will probably be so sUght that it wiU remain unnoticed, whUe the im- EXTERNAL FOUNDATIONS OF THE NATIONAL LDEA 77 provement of our popular health will continue to make itself felt. But we cannot possibly agree with those who beheve that a lesser increase is not only desirable for us, for economic reasons, but actually to be striven for. Without considering the morahty of the question in this connection at aU, we emphasize the fact that only a powerful and lasting pressure from within can give enduring strength to our material expansion. With out this the German idea can neither succeed in the world, nor bring about conditions at home which will foster its growth. Either we continue to grow as we have done in the last generation or we must give up our struggle with the Anglo-Saxons for an active participa tion in the formation of the civUized world. A stand- stiU or a rapid decrease in our numerical growth, and at the same time the maintenance of our claim that the German idea should be universally powerful in the world — such a combination is impossible. Let us then reckon with the probability that the average increase of our population will not be less from 1910 to 1930 than it has been from 1890 to 1910, i. e., fin round figures eight hundred thousand people an- /nuaUy, and let us study our economic Ufe as it has been in the recent past, and probably will be in the next two decades. We take as a starting point for the sake of comparison the year 1880, for two reasons. First, be cause the methodical basis of our present commercial 78 GERMAN WORLD POLICIES statistics dates from this year, and secondly, because the solid effect of the altered external conditions of Ger many did not begin to show in a steady and rapid in crease of our economic Ufe before the second decade after the foundation of the empire. At first this increase is not excessive as appears from the figures of our foreign trade. Such figures are gen erally considered to be the most reliable measure of the activities of a country. In 1880 the German ex ports were two and ninety-five hundredths milUard marks; 1 the imports two and eighty-six hundredths milUard marks. After two decades, in 1899, the ex ports amounted to four and thirty-seven hundredths miUiards and the imports to five and seventy-eight hundredths milliards. That is more than a doubling of one figure, and almost a doubling of the other figure. The growth of both figures was steady, but by no means rapid until 1902. In 1880 they were in round figures three miUiard marks, in 1902, after twenty-two years, the imports amounted to about six, and the exports to about five milUard marks. The next years from 1903 to 1907, reveal a rapid jump in the increase of our economic Ufe. In tmly five years the imports grow to over nine and five-tenths milliard marks, and the exports 'A German mark equals a Uttle less than twenty-four cents. Figures given in marks should, therefore, be divided by four and one-quarter to get the approximate equivalent in dollars or by twenty-one to get the equivalent in pounds. EXTERNAL FOUNDATIONS OF THE NATIONAL IDEA 79 to almost seven and five-tenths milUard marks. Let us realize the fuU meaning of these figures in a brief sta tistical table: Imports Exports 1880 2 . 86 milliard marks 2 . 95 milliard marks 1902 5.92 " " s.oo " 1907 9-57 " " 7-44 " These figures show that the five years from 1902 to 1907 have brought a heavier increase in both exports and imports than the twenty-two years from 1880 to 1902. Barring the new countries which are only just beginning to enter on the commerce of the world, as for instance, Argentina, no other country in the whole world has ever recorded such a flight in its industrial Ufe. If we furthermore realize the tremendous size of the amounts here under consideration, we may truly say that we are almost dizzy at the pace of our advance. There foUowed a halt, to be sure, after 1907, and even a temporary downward tendency of the curve. The years of 1908 and 1909 reveal the results of the inter national crisis in commercial affairs. But in 1910 the imports of nine and fifty-five hundredths milliard marks have almost caught up with those of 1907, whUe the exports of eight and eight hundredths miUiard marks have outstripped the earlier record figure of seven and forty-four hundredths milliards by almost half a mil Uard marks. The total foreign trade of Germany was 80 GERMAN WORLD POLICIES seventeen milUard marks in 1907, and seventeen and five- tenths mUUard marks in 1910. The figures for 191 1 are not yet completed, but it seems as if combined ex ports and imports amounted to almost nineteen miUiard marks. Such periods of retrogression or of standstiU, as we experienced in 1908 and 1909, are bound to hit the world commerce of nations occasionaUy. They break the advance with the inevitableness of natural phenomena, and hit the hardest those nations whose Ufe is the most intense. When the crisis is over, the growth is the largest. The development of Germany does not become per fectly clear to us until we compare it with that of other nations,1 the most important of which are France, Eng land, and the United States. In 1891, about twenty years ago, the figures were, in miUion of marks: Germany France England United States Imports 4,571 4,810 8,896 3,549 Exports .3.54° 3,832 6,315 3,715 Total 8,111 8,642 15,211 7,264 In 1900 "the picture is already much changed: Germany France England United States Imports 6,129 4,791 10,671 3,570 Exports 4,960 4,417 7,229 5,857 Total 11,080 9,208 17,900 9,427 1 The comparisons are based on the figures of the Statistic An nual of the German Empire which we have also previously followed. We always consider the total exports and imports, including the trade passing through the several countries. EXTERNAL FOUNDATIONS OF THE NATIONAL IDEA 8 1 Germany, as we see, has moved from third to second place, and France from the second place to the last place. We continue, nevertheless, to be in a class with the Americans and the French as about equally ad vanced commerciaUy, compared with the EngUsh whose trade is over sixty per cent greater than the German, and over ninety per cent greater than the French or the American trade. The international trade reached its zenith, as we saw, in 1907, and the figures for this year were: Germany France England United States Imports 9,570 6,300 13,174 6,025 Exports 7,44i 5,805 10,567 7,900 Total 17,011 12,105 23,741 13,925 For 1910 the proportional figures are very much the same. 'One sees how Germany had begun to grow out of the class represented by France and America and to take a position midway between these states and England. The Enghsh trade exceeds the French by almost' one hundred per cent, "and the American by seventy per cent, but the German by hardly forty per cent. In 1891 the Enghsh imports alone were over seven hundred miUion marks greater than the combined German exports and imports, and England's total trade almost twice that of Germany. Seventeen year* later it was barely one and one-half times as great. Every time the Enghsh are taking two steps we are taking 82 GERMAN WORLD POLICIES three, and if their development and ours maintains the same character in the immediate future, our trade wUl equal theirs in from twelve to fifteen years. The ex ample of France, on the other hand, shows that a nation whose population has come to a standstiU may yet be able to advance commercially to a certain degree owing to the prosperity of its people, but that it faUs de cidedly behind those nations who enjoy a heavy in crease. The other nations compared with these four leading nations show much smaller and in some cases insig nificant figures of trade statistics. Russia, with twice as many inhabitants as Germany, has only one-quarter of its trade, and that of Austria-Hungary equals the trade of Russia. Italy, which has half as many people as we have, enjoys a Uttle less than one-quarter, and Spain only one-tenth of our trade. The most important lesson from our three brief tables is our increasingly rapid approach to England. This contains the definite proof for those who can read figures with understanding that our conditions also are con stantly growing more Uke the EngUsh. We too exist more and more by our world commerce and less by our home industries. The fateful difference between them and us is the fact that in England the whole na tion knows that it is bound up in its worlH commerce and that all world affairs are its own- while with us EXTERNAL FOUNDATIONS OF THE NATIONAL LDEA 83 only very few people have reached this conviction. Trade figures alone do not create a world power. The spirit of world pohtics is needed. Great exports and imports are ours; we build ships and produce coal, iron, machinery and dry goods in large quantities, but the spirit of world poUtics is not yet ours! Our spirits are of a different order, of castes and parties and phiUstinism, aU active negations of a national spirit. The spirit, of business and industry tries to reach out farther, but as yet it is not working consciously and with a purpose for our national future in a broader sense. The some what excusable egoism of its own interests still lacks the moral consecration which only the categorical im perative of service in the interest of the national idea can give. Herein Ues the strength of the greater moral power of the Anglo-Saxons in the poUtics of the world. Behind the actual trade figures, therefore, we must read another invisible but mighty balance on the credit side of the EngUsh account. The comparative figures cited above sufficiently prove the growth of the German trade. A correspond ing advance is shown at home in the movement of coal, in the production of iron, and in our general industry; in the growth of our railroad system, banks, and com mercial fleet, of the post office and telegraph systems, and in all the other branches of our business Ufe. To elucidate these several items is not necessary, because 84 GERMAN WORLD POLICIES there is no lack of appreciation of them among wide circles of German people. That our industry and every thing connected with it have made long strides forward, is known even to demagogues, social democrats, and country squires. The thing they do not know, or do not care to know, is that for this very reason we are obliged to readjust our national sense to the world of transoceanic interests and to the duty of the German idea in the world. The conclusions which are drawn from the comparison of the industrial progress of England and of Germany are often qualified by the statement that the EngUsh are much richer than the Germans. The same asser tion is, of course, also made with regard to France. It may be true that a greater average of money faUs to every individual EngUshman or Frenchman than to every German. This would, however, stUl be true if the sum total of the Enghsh or French national posses sions did not exceed the German, for there are sixty- five miUion Germans, and only forty miUion French and forty-six miUion EngUsh. Much depends, more over, on how the national resources are invested. A country of such rapid industrial development as Ger many needs much money for the founding of new in dustries, in which the newly created capital is at once absorbed. The French whose business Ufe pulsates more softly, are saving their money and buying endow- EXTERNAL FOUNDATIONS OF THE NATIONAL IDEA 85 ment policies. This explains why France is the inex haustible lender in the money-market. Authoritative economists beheve that the German national wealth does no longer lag behind the French, but has actually outstripped it. In the first place we are far more nu merous than the French; secondly we need much more capital for new industries than they; and in the third place we use a far greater proportion of our income for the creation of living values, i. e., the education of chil dren. So it happens that France has the appearance of being richer than we are. Nothing is more difficult than to estimate the wealth of a people, and nothing less certain. Comparing Eng land and Germany we are nevertheless compelled to caU the former country as yet the richer, both absolutely and relatively. A glance at the EngUsh trade figures shows this. England's imports are by from three to three and five-tenths milUard marks greater than her exports. This enormous passivity of her trade which almost equals the total trade of a country Uke Italy, is fully covered by the proceeds flowing into England from the investments made by English capital in foreign lands or in foreign stocks, and the income from the EngUsh ships working for foreign countries. The German trade balance is also passive, not quite so much as the EngUsh, but by from one and five-tenths to two miUiard marks annually. This deficit is, how- 86 GERMAN WORLD POLICIES ever, so fully covered that Germany has continuaUy grown wealthier in the last twenty years, a fact which our own personal experience proves so conclusively that no further proof is needed. The needs of aU classes have grown. This is only possible if the individual incomes have also grown. The assertion frequently made that the increased cost of living balanced the larger incomes is erroneous. It is true neither for the laborers — where even the social democrats agree that the increased pay during the last decade exceeds the increased cost of Uving, and that the conditions of the laboring men are much improved — nor is it true of the prosperous upper classes. Rent, clothes, house hold furnishings, etc., have grown in price, but they have also been much improved. An enormous quan tity of trash, to be sure, is still manufactured and sold in Germany, but the awful ignorance which existed in the eighties and early nineties as regards appearance and essence, material and form, is gradually disappear ing. We are stiU far behind England, but equally far from the miserable state of affairs which used to be ours. The charge that German affairs today have a touch of the "nouveau riche" is not without some justification. Our middle class spends too much of its income on ex ternal and showy things, and is stingy in respect to the values of real Ufe; our wealthy people often betray in their expenditures a notable ignorance of the harmony EXTERNAL FOUNDATIONS OF THE NATIONAL LDEA 87 between culture and taste — but money circulates today far more freely than heretofore. In Prussia — the corresponding figures for the whole empire are not clearly avaUable, although they would seem to show similar results — the taxable income was not quite six milUard marks in 1892. In 1910 it had more than doubled, amounting to fourteen and five- tenths miUiard marks. The proceeds from the income tax grew in these years from about one hundred and twenty-five million marks to about three hundred thirty- eight mUUon marks. This increase parallels, it wiU be seen, the growth of our industrial Ufe as expressed in our foreign trade, and is much greater than the increase in population would lead us to expect. Wherever we turn in our survey of German national hfe, we are met by progress. In nine years, from 1900 to 1908, the savings bank deposits grew from eight and nine-tenths milliard marks to fourteen and six-tenths miUiard marks; at present they have reached the enor mous sum of eighteen milUard marks ! In 1895 the wealth in Prussia on which supplementary taxes were laid was sixty-four miUiard marks. For the tax issue of 1911-13 it has been estimated to be one hundred and four miUiard marks. The number of people, moreover, whose income is subject to this tax has grown more than 50 per cent whUe the population itself has only grown by about 29 per cent. The national wealth, therefore, 88 GERMAN WORLD POLICIES grows stiU faster than the population, and if the occa sional periods of an industrial crisis did not occur, the rate of progress would be even faster. The year 191 1, with a sum of nineteen miUiard marks for the combined ex ports and imports, reveals us in a position which Eng land had not reached earlier than ten years ago. Why do we place together here these figures which show the material progress of Germany? What is their meaning for the subject under discussion? Is the na tional idea expressed in interest drawn from invest ments and increased salaries? We reply: An increase in population, mdustry, and prosperity is not of itself what we desire, but we see in it what the Germans may be capable of doing along the line of permeating the world with their German-national Ufe. The stronger the national body grows from which forces are issuing, the more irresistibly they are felt. If we did not foUow the Enghsh with our giant's strides of industrial progress, the talk of the German idea in the world would be futile. Only simple-minded people can think of the expan sion of our interests without at once realizing the op position which it arouses. We should never forget that every step we take nearer to the position held by Eng land makes the problem more acute for her whether she will or will not recognize our influence on the busi ness, the pohtics, and the culture of the world as para mount with her own. Year by year the EngUsh are EXTERNAL FOUNDATIONS OF THE NATIONAL IDEA 89 obUged to ask more seriously: ShaU it be true in future that the world is growing more and more EngUsh, or shall it be true, after today or tomorrow, that the world is growing more and more English and also more and more German? England would not act naturaUy, if she did not draw into her account with us also the sympathy with her of the other nations which are threatened by the powerful development of Germany. The result for us is that we must some day capitulate before the demand to restrict our interests, or we must so strongly fortify ourselves that we can meet such requests. It is not necessary for us to attack anyone, while the natural progress of our growth and the rapid increase in our necessities of hfe compel others to decide whether they will let us grow stronger, or wiU try to stop our growth while it is time. The more pointedly we place the EngUsh and French before this alternative, the more fooUsh it would be of us, if we permitted our aversion to the expenditures for our national defenses to sterilize voluntarily the process of our national life ! \l What we have learned of the increase of our wealth should encourage us in making our decision between taking risks or renouncing a great future. Germany increased the cost of her army between 1902 and 1911 from about 670 to about 810 miUion marks, and for the navy from about 205 to 450 milUon marks, or for the 90 GERMAN WORLD POLICIES army and navy combined from 875 to 1,260 miUion marks. At the same time the population grew by eight and five-tenths miUions. The per capita expense was, therefore, in 1902 for the army 11. 5 marks and for the navy 3.5 marks, or together slightly more than 15 marks. In 191 1, however, these figures were respec tively 12.3 and 6.9 marks, or together 19.2 marks. This increase is undeniable, but if we consider the advance in our national prosperity, we see that the burden grows less rapidly than the power to bear it. England expended in 1902, 585 mUUon marks for the army and 633 miUion marks for the navy, or to gether 1,218 milUon marks. In 191 1, her army budget was 547 milUon marks and her navy budget 906 miUion marks, or together 1,453 milUon marks. Every EngUsh man, therefore, paid ten years ago 14 marks for the army and 15 marks for the navy, together 29 marks. In 191 1 he paid 12 and 20 marks respectively, or together 32 marks. These are almost 13 marks or 60 per cent more than the German per capita expenditures. How ever great one may think the English national wealth to be, no one wiU claim that it is more than one and one-half times as great as the German. It is, therefore, impossible to claim that Germany had burdened herself with her armaments more heavily than England. In all probabiUty the German burden is less. If one wishes to take the foreign trade of England and of Germany EXTERNAL FOUNDATIONS OF THE NATIONAL LDEA 91 respectively as a measure of the financial ability of both nations to bear miUtary burdens, then the English armament is a heavier load for her to bear than the German army and navy are for us, for England's trade excels ours by 40 per cent, while her military budget exceeds ours by almost 60 per cent. France spent in 1902, 584 millions for her army, and 243 millions for her navy, or together 827 mUlion marks, i. e., for each individual 15 and a little over 6 marks, or together about 21 marks. In 191 1 the corresponding figures were 718 and 333 millions or together 1,051 mil lion marks, or for each individual 18 and 8.5 marks, together 26.5 marks. That is less than England pays, but considerably more than we are paying. It is thus impossible to claim that we are more heavily burdened even than France, whUe our industry, commerce and prosperity grow even faster when we compare Germany with France rather than with England. Of the other world powers, the United States is hardly to be drawn into a comparison, because her geographical position renders her practicaUy secure from hostile attacks. The miUtary and naval expenditures, there fore, which she nevertheless incurs, are not to be con sidered, as ours must be, from the point of view of neces- sary national defenses. In spite of this her army budget was in 1902, 511 miUion marks, and in 191 1 559 miUion marks, and her navy budget 349 and 535 mUUon marks 92 GERMAN WORLD POLICIES respectively. The total figures, therefore, were 860 in 1902 and 1,006 million marks in 191 1. Estimated on the per capita rate, the figure for 191 1 is almost twelve marks. Our aUy, Austria-Hungary, expended for her army and navy 402 miUion marks in 1902; and 509 miUion marks in 1911, and that was less than 9 marks per person in 1902, and is today more than 10.5 marks. Compared with Germany this indicates a much smaller financial abUity. One must, however, concede that the Hapsburg dynasty can achieve much more as soon as it exerts itself. Italy expended in 1902, 196 miUion marks for her army and 87 million marks for her navy; and in 1911, 317 and 156 million marks respectively, or together 473 miUion marks. This increase is far greater than the German, for in 1902 every Italian paid 8.5 marks, and in 1911 13.5 marks. Since Italy cannot be remotely compared with Germany in an economic way, it is clear that the ItaUans are wilUng to bear today a far heavier burden than we are carrying. Russia finaUy has increased her army expenditures from 741 million marks in 1902 to 1,048 milUon marks in 1911, and her navy expenditures from 217 to 238 million marks. Her total military expenditures amount today to 1,286 miUion marks, which is greater than ours. In 1902 every Russian had to pay 7 marks, in EXTERNAL FOUNDATIONS OF THE NATIONAL IDEA 93 191 1 he paid 8.5 marks. Considering the incomparable backwardness of the Russian economic conditions, this burden is far greater than a people should be asked to carry, according to our ideas. It can be carried only if the cultural requirements at home, such as the schools and the other means of spiritual uplift, are outrageously slighted. Only a state with a practically absolute form of government and a well defined national sense in the educated upper classes coupled with an infinite ability on the part of the masses to bear almost incredible con ditions, is able to grant such a high position in its budget to its miUtary expenses as Russia does. If we were to follow Russian principles, we could easily afford twice or three times as much as we actually are paying. After these discussions there can be no doubt left as to the material ability of the national German Ufe to bear its burdens for the expansion of the German idea in the world. What we are doing today for our armament we are doing easUy, and since we are continuing to grow in population and in prosperity, it is nonsense to say tiiat our military burdens are oppressive now and should not be made more so. Which load pressed heavier on us, the fifteen marks in 1902 or the nineteen marks in 191 1? And if in future the sum will be twenty marks or more, will not, in spite of the increased miU tary expenses, more money remain in our pockets for our civil Ufe, eating, drinking, rent, art, travel, and other 94 GERMAN WORLD POLICIES luxuries than we had in 1902, the year when only two- fifths of the present income was declared and taxed in Prussia? Our growth may be our pledge for a future greatness by the side of the Anglo-Saxon world nations. But it may also be the cause of mcalculable misery, if it does not serve us to burst the bars and bolts which other people are forging for us. They are doing this, because they do not wish that our expansion shall result in their being crowded. They will not hesitate to make use of the moment which wiU seem opportune to them for restraining and fettering us. They see more clearly than we whither our future is driving us, that we needs must be joint directors of the world, or decay. And there are Germans who ask: How much can I afford to pay for the future of the German idea? CHAPTER IV STRENGTH AND WEAKNESS We have tried thus far to present those drawbacks to our rise among the nations which have resulted from our history, and its effect upon our national character, and to give a survey of our material solvency, which is a fact in spite of those drawbacks. Before entering on the task of pointing out definite lines to the working of the German idea in the world, we must seek a clear answer to one more question, which is more important than anything else, and which wiU determine whether we shall be able to be a world power. It is: What can our innate ideal forces accomplish in the face of those drawbacks, and to what extent wUl the harmful forces retain their supremacy? Someone may remark that it is doubtful whether even the ideal forces of our national Ufe can lastingly counterbalance our deep-seated defect, we mean the lack of that great political virtue which prefers what ever makes for union to whatever is tending toward separation. The weight of this argument is so great that one can well understand those Germans who de- spair of their future in the highest sense because of it. 9$ 96 GERMAN WORLD POLICIES But one may meet it with the observation that the out ward union of Germany, although it was achieved by compulsion and only in part, has given us a strong, virile pohtical organism for the first time in our history. The virtues of the German mind., which exist in spite of our faults, were given a freer scope in 1871 than they had ever had. Everyone can see the glorious results of the foundation of the empire along material fines, al though almost half of the southern people had to be ruthlessly separated from the empire. It is not possible to doubt that the transformation of our poUtical Ufe gave a start to this development, and actuaUy brought out many motive forces which until then had been unknown. Such a result is not possible, considering the weighty outside obstacles, except by the assistance of an ideal spring of energy. The very process of the rapid growth of our popu lation which we called the elementary cause of our national progress, is as much moral as it is natural. This conviction grows, the more thoughtfully we con sider the statistics of our marriages and births, which have begun to recede. Figures speak, it has been said, and these figures are speaking in a very serious tone, for they express not only the result of some material changes, but also the altered German psychology from the point of view of German morality. In calling atten tion to the decline in numbers of our marriages and STRENGTH AND WEAKNESS 97 births, we must remember that the fear of wedlock and of chUdren has more than once been the beginning of the moral ruin of a nation. The love of married life and of many children is the best measure of a people's inner and outer health. Tacitus knew this when he held up the example of the Germans as a mirror to his corrupt contemporaries. "So they receive one spouse, just as they have only one body and one Ufe. There are no idle thoughts, no continual desires — and it is not so much the spouse as wedlock that should be loved. To Umit the number of children, or to put to death a blood relative is a heinous crime, and good morals achieve more with them, than good laws accomplish elsewhere." By the side of these golden words of the old Roman writer we quote the advice of the man who among us moderns knows best how to talk eloquently and inci sively of the fertility of our people as its most natural moral possession: "The blessing of many children is still with us, in spite of all difficulties, as an after effect of those centuries which have kept their meaning ahve in our morals and religion, nature's own sense of Ufe which has maintained itself against the cold doctrine of utiUty, the darkly felt duty which the individual owes to his race. In this respect we are hving on the capital of the past, and should see to it that it is replen ished. To the extent to which nature and the strong 98 GERMAN WORLD POLICIES mating sense of the past grow duU, we must take active steps toward recognizing that the bearing of children is a pubUc achievement, unless we are wiUing as a nation to retrograde. Above everything we shaU have to make it easier for the woman to be a mother. This is the first and the most difficult problem of the woman question." The popular moraUty which these words depict, is with the majority of those who follow its dictates, noth ing of which they are conscious, but frequently an un conscious merit. MoraUty, however, is the greater the more it has entered into the personaUty of the individual or of the nation. The measure of moral insight depends in everything, and not only in the question of propaga tion, on the vividness of one's conscience. The con science of a nation and that of an individual are of en tirely different qualities, however much they are de pending on each other. The latter has to do with the morals of private or civic Ufe, the former with the com pulsory duties of the national idea. The German pos sesses a meagre national conscience, but the finest sense of personal duty of all nations. And if we ask whence flows the German progress in spite of all obstructions, the only possible answer is: from this source of the German individual conscience. The intensity of Ger man labor is equaUy great. No nation of the western civihzation is so ready to work for work's sake as we STRENGTH AND WEAKNESS 99 are. If we regard work as a process of Ufe necessi tated both by material and moral considerations, we may weU say that there is no other country in the world in which so much and such faithful and exact work is done as in Germany. We may even add that the de mands made on the conscientious worker are nowhere so great as with us. This principle goes equally through all the realms of German life. No one can deny that our school sys tem is the best developed in the world, with the possible exception of Denmark. There may be some unsatis factory sides to the pubhc schools in the eastern prov inces of Prussia, but on the whole we lead the nations, with our educational system from the primary school to the university. Our big industries, which are only a few decades old, and at first had to bear the comment that their products were "cheap and poor," are today only shghtly behind those of England which can look back upon a schoohng of two hundred years. In every thing that has to do with the modern development of natural sciences, both speculative and experimental, such as apphed chemistry, physics, electricity, and the Uke, we are on the point of being the leaders as weU scientificaUy as industrially. Our technical schools produce such a large number of authorities along these lines, and these men are, on the average, able to respond to so great and constantly increasing demands, that IOO GERMAN WORLD POLICIES even the EngUsh are unable to equal them. This does not mean that the leaders of science in England, France, and America accomplish less than we, nor that the average abUity there is less, but neither the Anglo- Saxons nor the Romanesque have as yet been able to equal our organization and the far-reaching and thor ough scientific instruction of great masses. The English system of a more practical education based on the sum- total of useful experiences, has graduaUy been obliged to recede before the slower, but more thorough and exact instruction of the German chemists, electro- technicians and other workers along scientific-industrial lines. Already voices are raised across the Channel caUing mournful attention to the superior education of the Germans. Our victorious advance, however, is not restricted to these fields alone, for the sphere within which we accomplish at first good and soon su perior work is constantly extending. In 1 88 1 the North German Lloyd had its first ex press steamer buUt to ply between Europe and America. It registered about forty-five hundred tons, and was from the present point of view hardly a moderately large ocean steamer. But at that time, thirty years ago, there was no ship yard big enough in Germany to undertake the work, and the North German Lloyd had to give the commission to the English yard of Elder & Co. The first man who dared to have the larger STRENGTH AND WEAKNESS IOI German men-of-war built at home, was Admiral von Stosch in the early eighties. In 1885 the North German Lloyd decided to accept the conditions on which the imperial subsidy to the maU carrying steamers to Aus- traUa and East Asia were contingent, viz., that the ships were buUt in Germany and of German material. Six years later the Hamburg-American Line launched the express steamer "Furst Bismarck," which accom pUshed on its maiden trip the fastest run ever made from Europe to America. People in England as weU as in America were actuaUy aghast at the progress of the German ship industry, which ten years ago had been regarded as practicaUy non-existing. The English had the same experience again, when they started the dreadnought type of battleships immediately after the Russo-Japanese war. They beheved that we should not be able to follow them at once, and that they could thus gain a decided start. The opposite happened. We followed suit immediately, and today the largest and best equipped man-of-war in the world is a Ger man battleship. What has enabled us to make this unexampled prog ress? Nothing but the intensity of our labor, taught with scientific accuracy, and imbued with an unexceUed sense of duty. If back of this precision and technical perfection there were also the determined will of a great and united national sense of duty, then the German 102 GERMAN WORLD POLICIES idea could take 3 flight into the world which would very soon bring it abreast of the Anglo-Saxon idea. If we turn to the other side of our industrial life, we see that we are in a state of transition, but progressing aU the time, and assured of a high place among the industrial nations, provided we persevere. Every large mdustry has begun by making goods which are in great demand cheaper than they could be made by hand. As a result the individual article lost not only in actual but also in authentic value, but the low price was the determining factor. We see today old civilized coun tries across the ocean, where an honest technic of handi work used to prevaU, inundated with goods in bulk made in large factories. The beautiful knotted tapestry bags in which the Armenian and the Persian brides used to carry their dowries and on which they had worked for years, are giving way to gaudily lacquered tin boxes from Russian factories, and the artistic native textures of the Javanese have to yield to the cheapest cotton. It will not be long before the manufacture of such goods will take place in those countries themselves, and experience teaches us that the new countries sub ject to European culture, from North America to Ar gentina and New Zealand, which at first were satisfied if they swamped us with their wool, grain, and meat, and took the products of our industry in exchange, are now themselves buUding factories, and erecting STRENGTH AND WEAKNESS 103 high tariff walls for the protection of their own grow ing industry. These countries which have no old civiliza tion of their own, and no original connection with Euro pean industrial culture, wiU be unable for a long while to create anything but articles made in bulk to satisfy their own demands. Goods of quaUty need for their protection more than labor and capital, they require a certain amount of tradition, taste and technical and spiritual knowledge, such as can only be gained in several successive industrial generations. This fact prescribes , the road we must take. If our wish were to create only goods of bulk for the markets of the world, we should be obliged to work more and more cheaply in order to underbid the growing industries in the countries across the sea. In such a competition, however, we should doubtless be the first to give out, because we have to defray the expenses both of manufacture and of trans portation, and because our higher civilization will not let us cheapen the production of our goods below a certain point, at the expense of the living conditions of our laborers. We must, therefore, change in time as many of our exports as possible into goods of quaUty. Since almost aU trading nations are growing more pros perous owing to the enormous increase in production all over the world, those people who create exceptional industrial values wiU not lack a ready market. As a matter of fact those two people of Europe who are the IO4 GERMAN WORLD POLICIES most highly developed industriaUy, England and Ger many, exchange greater values with each other than with any other nation, except America, which has a monopoly in cotton. The importance of ideal factors for the material Ufe is shown by France, which maintains her relatively high place in the markets of the world for no other reason than that she possesses, according to the belief of all other producing nations, the advantage of good taste and elegance, and that her language has kept its place as one of the important languages of the world, owing to her former pohtical supremacy. We shaU not con test with the French those prizes which they as yet successfuUy maintain, but we shaU say to ourselves: The victory wiU be ours, not only in those industries which depend on the application of our mathematical and physical knowledge, but also in those of spinning and weaving, of working cloths, tools, machinery, weap ons, vehicles, etc., provided we continue to work into better materials more science, exactness, and general culture. One great drawback along these lines is our insufficient sense for the quaUty and harmony of ma terial and form which we have inherited in everything from the times of our great national misery from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century. It is necessary to feel the need of only good things, and good material and good appearance in one's own surroundings, be- STRENGTH AND WEAKNESS 105 fore one can begin to make such things for the market of the nations. But we are constantly improving. If it is permissible to point here to just one promising manifestation, mention may be made of the Society of Arts and Crafts (the "Deutsche Werkbund"), whose aim is the improvement of the quahty of our industries. How quickly success follows, when the worthy foun dations have been laid, we see by the international reputation of our ship builders and electro-technicians who were entirely unknown thirty years ago. We possess such an enormous spiritual fund in everything pertaining to well-taught, conscientious, and discipUned labor that no other nation can equal it. All that is needed is that the immense power which lies in this feeUng for culture be freed from the bondage in which our former poverty has cast it. As soon as this is done, the ideal and also the material working capital of the German people wiU take first rank in the world; that is, as soon as we have added to the moral demands of labor a self-sacrificing obedience to the demands of the national idea. We have sung the praises of our schools of science as exceUing those of all other nations, and based our hopes of our national future on them. How does this agree with the numerous complaints which are raised every where of the principles governing our schools and their actual working? 106 GERMAN WORLD POLICIES What is the German school intended to achieve? It is to communicate to the growing generation useful scientific and ideal educational values. There is no doubt that the amount of knowledge transmitted in our pubfic, intermediary, and other schools, gymnasia, etc., is considerable, in spite of several weU founded criticisms. He who measures with absolute standards wiU find shortcomings everywhere, but relatively we stand high, as is proved by a comparison with other countries. Even foreign nations recognize our schools as exemplary in material, method, and organization. The only question is, what do the German schools, both the lower and the higher, do for the national idea? If we should confess that they are doing very Uttle, we should probably be told that whatever is possible is done by placing emphasis on the patriotic element in the lessons, and in the several school celebrations, ad dresses, national hohdays, and so on. Quite true. Much is done in this direction, even too much, because time and labor spent on such things completely miss — in most cases — the very requirements of a national educa tion. The official German school patriotism considers it its duty to fill the pupils with enthusiasm for the united fatherland and the personaUties who were in strumental in bringing the union to pass. We also know that in addition a special loyalty to individual dynasties is preached in the several states from Prussia to Lippe, STRENGTH AND WEAKNESS 107 and that for this reason historical facts are often much distorted. It is apparent that the present system has achieved exceedingly smaU visible results, not to speak of its inherent elements of weakness. At least we can not see much success in the fact that forty years after the foundation of the empire, every third vote cast in the elections is cast for a poUtical party which most forcefuUy denies its loyalty to the existing conditions in the empire. Each one of the four miUion citizens who cast his vote for Social-Democratic representatives in parhament at the last election had been exposed seven or more years to the noisy workings of our patriotic instruction, and who wiU believe that it was only an instigated and bread-jealous mass of people, incapable of finer influences, which aired its bad temper in these miUions of ballots? The mistake in our education is that the national values are shown to our youths from a wrong angle. They are taught: that we have advanced so far thanks to our great princes and leaders; and that we must value what has been achieved, and be ready to protect it with our blood and our possessions as our fathers did. This kind of instruction, however, lacks the national propelling power, because it is unable to erect an ideal aim for the future, in which each one may be interested with his whole heart. According to it, there is after aU not very much difference between the battle of 108 GERMAN WORLD POLICIES Salamis and the battle of Sedan. Before 1870 the unity of Germany was the hoped-for aim, in which and through which the German poUtical ideaUsm survived. And after that, the generation which had lived through the victories for this year could be whole-heartedly enthused by the recoUection of those days. The succeeding gen eration to whom the events are only transmitted as historical facts needs more. National enthusiasm, as a fact, cannot be lastingly kindled on anything that has already been achieved and now exists, for it must be permeated, if it is to be strong and genuine, with the wish to press forward and with hopes of the future. This is the very thing lacking in our education. Where is the youth who hears anything of the future of the German idea in the world? What do our young people think when they sing or recite? German ways and German mirth Will restore this dear old earth — ? Nothing at aU. Of what use to them is an occasional word from high places: "Our future Ues on the water," or something Uke this? How many of us, old or young, know that a new period in the development of mankind has begun, and that the question for the German people is, will they be the hammer or the anvU in the coming age? Sedan and the emperor-proclamation were two great moments in German history, but their highest STRENGTH AND WEAKNESS 109 value is not that they have created unity and an em pire, but that by means of this union they have ad mitted us in the nick of time to the competition of the world powers for the formation of the fate of the world. If we do not recognize this, we shall soon enough look back upon them as on the battle of Poitiers or the vic tories of the Staufer in Italy. Toward the end of the nineteenth century the Anglo- Saxons were on the point of gaining the supremacy of the world in the sense that aU the influences of western civUization on the remaining people and countries, along pohtical economic and cultural lines, were grow ing to be distinctly Anglo-Saxon. They were able to do this because of the enormous progress in the com merce and the technique of the world, and their own magnificent condition, weU founded on centuries of growth. "The world is growing rapidly English." This motto was already flying over the oceans and con tinents outside of Europe. Then we Germans rose from our weakness which had lasted through four cen turies. We acted according to the advice, "If thy right hand offend thee, cut it off and cast it from thee, for it is more profitable for thee that one of thy members should perish than that thy whole body pofitic should decay," and the empire was created through Prussia. Then foUowed the dizzily rapid growth of our popula tion and strength. But the insight into the demands HO GERMAN WORLD POLICIES of our national idea for its new future, faUed to grow along with the rest. Without 1870 our fate was clear: to be the "cultural fertilizer" of the world across the seas, and at home to hve on as a modest and restrained people. Without our knowing it, the union has opened the door of hope for us of becoming a world nation, by the side of our cousins across the North Sea and the ocean, but only if we exert our powers to the utmost and use with courageous determination every one of our faculties. The EngUsh consciousness, however, revolts at the idea that the world all of a sudden should be fashioned not only on the EngUsh, but also on the German character. FuU of doubt and threats, England is wavering between submitting and fighting for the supremacy which she had already befieved achieved. The two strongest people of the globe are placed before a tremendous decision concerning their future. And we are one of these people. Where is the school which graduates the young man and the young girl fully aware of the weight of this fateful national question? Asking this question is equivalent to answering it. How can our schools give our national sense its proper nourishment, if they look not to the future, but to the past and the present? And whence can the picture of the German future gain a Uving form, if the concep tion does not exist that the arena for the history of the German idea consists no longer of the few thousand STRENGTH AND WEAKNESS III square miles of Europe, where we and our nearest neigh bors hve, but of the entire world? "My field is the world" — this motto is naUed to the house of the Han seatic merchant. He is thinking of his trade. But we must learn that it is not the German merchandise but the very scope of the German idea which can afford no smaUer sphere than the world itself. In view of this great lack of national feeling, it is no longer a question whether we shaU prefer the gym nasium or schools where the classics are not taught. The only necessary thing is that the whole education should gain a vivid effect in respect to the national idea. We are not so fortunate as the EngUsh and the Americans whose political presence enables them to foster the national ideahsm of youth by pointing to the seas and continents where the Anglo-Saxon banner flutters in the wind, and where hundreds of miUions of people are influenced by Anglo-Saxon culture. For the EngUsh school it is no task at aU to nourish the na tional idea, because the whole school system of England is steeped in the thought of national expansion, just as a man is depending on the air he breathes. The EngUsh youths grow up in the natural conviction that the world, or at least the whole transoceanic world, is identical with the sphere of Enghsh interests. No teaching is needed, only seeing and Uving. The map of the world is covered with the Enghsh red. There is 112 GERMAN WORLD POLICIES probably not a family where not one of its members or relatives, sons, daughters, or ancestors has been carried to India, America, the Cape, to the Interior of Africa, Austraha, or China, by the service in the army or civil employment, the navy, commerce, exploration, or mis sionary work. From whatever distant lands an Englishman returns home, he brings with him this experience, and he trans plants it into his home surroundings: The world grows EngUsh. Who can deny that it is much more difficult not only for our schools, but also for the great majority of us, to grow purposeful and to yield to the enthusiasm which the knowledge of a great aim impfies, not by seeing and hearing, but by learning and thinking, and Ustening to the speech of facts and figures? The youths of today and of the coming generation, nevertheless, must partake of such instruction, or there wiU be noth ing left for them to teU their children of the world-task of the German idea. We had to say aU this about the German schools, although we confessed earher and we wish to repeat, that it was our educational system from the pubUc school to the university and the speciaUzed technical institu tions which has raised us to our present high level of abUity. None of the greatest and most imposing achieve ments of our science and industry would have been possible without the unique foundation of our schools. STRENGTH AND WEAKNESS I13 They provide the endless human material — in a com petitive system which grows more and more difficult toward the top — which is needed to fill the inferior posi tions, and from which to choose the leaders. They enable us to appoint well trained people even to the lowest places in our industrial and governmental life. The success in the competition of nations depends largely on this: the high average of education. But we could not be spared the confession, that aU our faithful performance of duty, and zeal, and conscientious ness, aU our schools and upper schools may bring us to the gate which leads to world power, but they cannot unbar the bolts, if we do not learn in addition national insight and national determination. We Germans find happiness in our work. There is the same conscientiousness crowned by success, where the German people do not build ships and machinery nor gain knowledge, education, and technical abiUty, but create their armaments by land and sea. This is a phase of our national Ufe of which we may be especially proudx We know the danger of Uving in a false military security, of undervaluing one's possible foe, and of not realizing his possible advantages. But even if we esti mate calmly what our neighbors will be able to achieve, we may yet assert that we are undeniably superior to any one of them by the inherent quaUties of our army. Russia has shown in the test case of the Japanese 114 GERMAN WORLD POLICIES war that she is no longer capable of meeting the moral and psychological demands which a great modern war makes on the leaders as well as on the organized whole of the army. It has appeared with even greater clear ness that the control of so excessively compUcated a thing as a modern battleship, or stiU more an entire fleet, exceeds the present amount of Russian knowledge. Wars by land and sea are different things today from what they were in the times of Frederick or of Na poleon. Courage and strategic ability alone do not suffice, but such a perfect exactness in preparation is needed, and such a great knowledge of directing in battle the modern mechanical and moral apparatus, that a nation Uke Russia, which is spiritually as undeveloped and afflicted with such strong ethical defects in her upper classes as she is, is no longer able to continue in the competition. Alone she is, therefore, unable to carry on war with another European power, and her army could least of aU hold its own with ours, which possesses in the highest degree aU those virtues which most happily coincide with our national gifts. Our other neighbor, the French nation, is in some respects probably just as much equal to the demands of a modem war as we are, but the military psychology of the French is better adapted to impetuous enthusiasm than to the methodical hardships of war. There can be no doubt that the national readiness of the French STRENGTH AND WEAKNESS 115 to make sacrifices is stiU very great. There is, how ever, less reUabiUty in their various mUitary depart ments even in peace, and inythe exactness of the miUtary sense of duty of each individual officer of responsi bihty than there is with us. The well-known occurrences in the French navy prove the accuracy of this assertion. Our high grade sense of duty and minutest precision, which have developed so splendidly our technical and industrial Ufe, have made also of our miUtary defenses by land and by sea an organism of greater perfection than another people could have created elsewhere with equal means but differently constituted moral quahties. Our labor, our science, and our defenses, these are the three truly great things which we possess, and if proof were needed of our abihty to master within these three spheres even entirely new fields, our navy would offer it. Twenty years ago the German navy was not much more than a show piece which could at best win respect from third class robber nations, while the EngUsh people did not beheve it possible that the German navy ever could reach a size which would bring it into comparison with their own. Their disquiet began when our, navy grew and gave constantly new evidences of the excel lence of its material and its crews. If one thinks it over quietly, it is not at aU surprising that the EngUsh beUeved it to be impossible to create out of nothing and in such a short time a naval power of such a fighting value as Il6 GERMAN WORLD POLICIES our navy wiU shortly possess, and in part aheady en joys, for this achievement is as unprecedented as the growth of our commerce and industry, and possible only among German conditions. After the right way had been found, the development took place with auto matic precision. Ship after ship was put into commis sion, and crew after crew instructed, and every new performance of our technique of ship-buUding was more perfect than the preceding. To buUd large numbers of ships is after aU only a question of a state's finances and technique. But to make of ship and crew a Uving, ever-ready unit, and of several such units higher com binations which can move and fight Uke one organic body, according to a weU conceived plan and purpose, this is so much more difficult that one may weU say that a people of less precision in its labors and less ha bitual discipline than the Germans could never have accompUshed it. The best proof for the fact that we are not dealing here with an imaginary achievement, is the growing concern of the EngUsh, who surely are the people to judge what a navy is worth. If another people than we, with stronger instincts for the workings of a national idea, possessed our mUi tary abUity, it would walk with firm vision and deter mination along the path which its world-forming strength permitted it to enter. Above everything else its na tional consciousness would be nowhere more unified STRENGTH AND WEAKNESS I17 than in its pride of its defenses and its conviction that they should be developed to their utmost for the sake of the moment when they wiU be the factor which deter mines the future. But what do we see when we regard the behavior of our several parties in regard to our army, and especiaUy our navy! Not only among those parties, whose very existence depends on opposition, or to whom every proposition of the government is an acceptable subject of bargaining, but also among those of us who hold ourselves to be strictly national and friends of the army and navy. Everywhere we hear the diffident questions: What may our national future cost? At what tax rate does the growth of the German national idea in the world begin to be too expensive for us? How much alcohol and tobacco must I be able to purchase at a moderate cost lest my enthusiasm for the navy be drowned in the high price of beer? The army and the navy combined cost us today 1,260 milUon marks, or 19.20 M. per individual. Liquor, beer, and wine cost us 4,000 miUion marks, i. e., more than three times as much, or 62 M. per individual. If we add the tobacco, we shaU see that the Germans spend four times as much for these articles, which are pure luxuries, than for their army and navy! We have seen how rapidly our prosperity is growing, and that this growth exceeds the rates of the advance in expenditures for the army and navy. We have also Il8 GERMAN WORLD POLICIES seen what splendid national defenses we have been able to forge, and how surely we of aU people have succeeded in an incredibly short time, in building a navy which even the old mistress of the seas, England, is beginning to fear. And then there are milUons and miUions of Germans gathering daily around their famiUar tables in the beer restaurants and complaining: "What wiU be the end of this dreadful miUtarism!" Rather fewer ships and less German future than one dime less for beer! If things go on like this, the day will come when we shall have to say to ourselves: We have not been able to give Ufe to German ideas in the world, in spite of all our individual worth and schoohng and labor and sense of duty, because we lacked the insight and the strong wiU to do the last necessary thing, to translate force into effect. Who can fail to be reminded here of the sorrow which Goethe felt "when he thought of the German people who were individually so estimable, and so miserable as a whole." Sense of duty and work form the positive pole of the German character, while its negative pole is the aim- lessness of our national voUtion. Add to this the strug gle of the demoralizing class hatred against the na tional idea. Whatever the creative powers achieve is threatened with ineffectiveness by the steriUty of our national spirit and our worship of caste. The weight of this inheritance has lain heavily upon us throughout STRENGTH AND WEAKNESS 1 19 the centuries of our history, and does so today. We see this only too clearly when we turn from the German character as it is manifested in our history, schools, army, and navy, to its manifestations in our poUtical Ufe. We may be permitted to admire also here an im mense amount of labor conscientiously performed, but we shaU see at the same time the effects of our greatest fault. The peoples of western culture may be divided into those where self-government, and those where official control has been developed respectively. But the in herent state of health of a nation, whether it enjoys self-government or bureaucratic conditions, depends on the degree to which the representatives of public order resist the temptations to gain personal profit from their official positions. Neither bureaucracy nor self- government is a remedy against dishonesty. It may be difficult to decide whether the prize for official cor ruption should go to the absolute and bureaucratic empire of Russia or the democratic government of the city of New York. In England, on the other hand, and in Prussia, these two antipodes in the form of govern ment, the officials stand on the same high level of moral ity. Only he who has experienced both can judge of the tremendous difference it makes whether corruption or faithful performance of duty pervades the offices of a state. The greater his experience is the more con- 120 GERMAN WORLD POLICIES vinced he wiU be that absolute official honesty is a rarity in the states of this world, and a tremendous moral achievement of the nation which actuaUy enjoys it. The credit is the greater the stronger the bureaucratic form of government and its consequent official power are. If one reahzes how matters are in Germany in this respect, one must confess that it would have been impossible to create a force Uke that of the German officials with any other material than ours. A very human and specific German consideration, to be sure, plays here an important part. It has been said that the German officials are poorly paid, if one compares their pay with the luxurious salary of their EngUsh colleagues and the princely "graft" of the Russian officials. But our officials, Uke our officers in the army, receive only one-half of their pay in cash. The other half consists in their social position and the consequent advantages in the matrimonial market, etc. Our higher officials enjoy so clearly the leadership in our social Ufe that one may find in it much compensation for their smaU pay. Even the salaries of our chief justices and secretaries of state eUcit a pitying smile from the Eng- Ushmen. But for every German the assurance of an exclusive social position has such charm that the of ficial career appears to him to be desirable at all hazards. Even if we consider this by no means very ideal motif, there remains nevertheless among our officials STRENGTH AND WEAKNESS 121 such an amount of moral probity due to our national character that we may confidently assert that this part of our national pofitical organism is so strong that it can withstand the severest tests. Even the defects which are inherent in every bureaucracy and conse quently are found also among our officials cannot shake our confidence that here we have a vigorous manifesta tion of the ideal forces of which our people may boast. There is, however, one dangerous spot touching on the moral foundation of our public fife to be found even among our officials, the temptation to yield deference to the sense of class loyalty rather than to the national idea. The German official is as perfect a type in his way as the German laborer, man of science, teacher, soldier, or officer. Officialdom, however, is not identical with the state. It serves, but it does not support the state. The state by its very existence is meant to realize the national idea, which would have only a shadowy exist ence without it. Every state organism, however, de pends for its force of action upon the submission of aU special interests to the welfare of the whole. As we understand the idea of a state, all its institu tions should be adapted for the end of educating every citizen to work freely and consciously for the develop ment of the national entity, and should never be abused to give special privileges to one class or another at the /. 122 GERMAN WORLD POLICIES expense of the whole, i. e., at the expense of the national idea. It is here where our individual morality must be supplemented by the moraUty of pubUc institutions as a whole, if we may hope to develop our national power of achievement. The EngUsh people of all nations have achieved the greatest political morality, for their public institutions serve most fuUy to make individual strength serviceable to the pubhc good, and it may be said of them, if of anybody, that no special groups of people can utilize their public institutions for their own special benefit. It may be added for those who desire an obvious quali fication of the above assertion, that it is of course only relatively true, and that even the English public Ufe is no stranger to some things of doubtful moraUty, and that the present exceUence has not been achieved with out a struggle. If in actual pohtical Ufe, one class can make the in stitutions work for its own benefit, close and effective relations must necessarily exist between it and the officers of the state. Such relations do exist with us between our estate-holding nobility and our higher officials. No one can deny that an exceptionally large number of important offices are filled with representa tives of that class, and it would be both improbable and unnatural if this did not result in practical benefits for the great landed proprietors. In so far as this con- STRENGTH AND WEAKNESS 1 23 cerns our poUtics the other parties should fight against it. In so far as questions of public morality are con cerned, these should be submitted to the national con science. It is impossible to govern a nation today without its claiming the right to criticize the government and its officials with absolute freedom. It makes a great difference for the effectiveness of the national idea at home and abroad, whether the practical insight or the moral authority of the government appears to be de serving of criticism. If the latter is the case, the na tional idea is more severely shaken, and it matters little, whether the important officials are conscious of wrong doing or not. Where such guilt exists it should not be judged by the customary standards of right and wrong, but according to whether these influential positions are in touch with the national conscience or not. It is as impossible to govern without regard to what the people consider moraUy right in public life, as to govern without pubhc consent at all. As soon as it appears that poUtical or other material advantages accrue to a certain class from some pubUc institution, nothing in the world will prevent the masses from believing that the government is working in the interest of this special class. The government has then forfeited its moral authority and all resultmg dissatisfaction, and passion and class hatred are laid at its door. 124 GERMAN WORLD POLICIES Exactly the same thing wiU occur when govern mental control and judicial authority give the appear ance of not meting out justice with the same measure to aU classes. Our courts rank very high compared with those of other countries, but more and more fre quently we hear the awful words: "Special justice for privileged classes;" and it is not always possible to deny them. Members, for instance, of exclusive coUege socie ties are often privileged both in the civil and in the mihtary courts, and actually seem to beUeve that the ordinances regarding disturbances of the peace, com mitting public nuisances or inflicting bodily harm are not meant for them. It is, moreover, an estabUshed fact that rowdyism is more severely punished, if it is committed by a member of the so-caUed lower classes than by one of the privileged classes. The very op posite would be the proper thing. A few years ago we received an exceedingly painful impression of the procedure of Prussian justice when a man of the highest nobiUty was criminaUy indicted and the question arose whether the charge could be pressed. This man Uves today under the very shadow of the court house the life of a grand seigneur, without having been compeUed to prove his innocence in open court. The people will never be convinced that any other ordinary mortal could have lastingly escaped further prosecution after the case against him had at one time STRENGTH AND WEAKNESS 1 25 been suspended for reasons which to be sure had been perfectly legitimate for a temporary suspension. It may be said that a country is weU off when the cases can be singly enumerated where the state has for feited some of its moral authority. This is true. But we must remember that there is one line of develop ment among our officials which we must regard with alarm, even if we are convinced of their generally high efficiency. This is that in high quarters that mode of thought is fostered which looks upon blind obedience to the wishes of the highest authority as a sign of ex ceptional rehabiUty and patriotism. The result of this wiU be that unprincipled men of genius and men able to work only in ruts will join the circle, while the truly big men wiU go where they may preserve their inde pendence. We do not beUeve that we are irretrievably started on this road, but the tendencies are there. Can it be doubted that this is the reason why the highest positions in the state have begun to be vacated by men whose very individuality is their strength of character? Not aU officials can be men of genius and giants in strength of character, but if a nation wUl continue in good health, its highest offices which determine its fate must offer to such men the possibiUty of a free sphere of effective activity. It would be fooUsh to claim that this was no longer possible with us, but the charm of filling high positions where it is difficult to be true to 126 GERMAN WORLD POLICIES one's convictions, is beginning to fade, for the man who looks for rapid advancement in the service of the state has learned that today influential coUege connections are, to say the least, as important as the possession of a strong personality and of comprehensive knowledge. Side by side with the poUtical agencies prescribed by the constitution other factors exist which although not conditioned by constitutional necessities are never theless the result of their actual workings. Parties are in themselves an almost inevitable result of every po Utical progress, but in Germany a special evil has been attached to them due to our national fault: class dis tinctions and a lacking appreciation of the natural aim of the national idea. The most pronounced and at present most notable party in Germany is the Social-Dem6cratic. Here we meet at once the typical result of our system of castes. The Social-Democratic point of view is proscribed as moraUy inferior. This is not the place to attempt a critique of the Utopian notions on which the Social- Democratic conception of the world is based, but it must be said that it is altogether wrong to shift the question whether the Social-Democrats are right from the poUtical to the moral battle-ground. Only thought less people or those who are bUnded by their pohtical fanaticism can hope to make of Germany a Social- Democratic repubUc. But it is sheer nonsense to hold STRENGTH AND WEAKNESS 1 27 that it is not morally permissible to prefer a repubUc to a monarchy or government ownership to private capital. The fact that the German Social-Democracy is so overfuU of vindictiveness and stupidity that the charge against it of anti-patriotism is almost true, is partly due, as we saw above, to our national fault — under which aU parties are suffering — and is partly. the result of our, sharply defined class distinctions. No EngUshman or Frenchman would dream of thinking of the Social-Democratic Party as morally inferior. In so far as it has become a national danger with us, we are ourselves to blame, for the Social-Democrats are not altogether wrong when they claim that the advantages of a national state are not the advantage of the nation but of the ruling classes. This claim is greatly exaggerated by this party, as is characteristic of it, but it has its foundation in fact. Whenever our Social-Democracy comes in contact with our official life, we must confess that a double standard of justice is the rule. No man of sense, however, believes any more that the social dissatisfaction in Germany wiU culminate in the attempt at overthrowing the whole form of our government, in spite of the party organization of the Social-Democrats and the impetus received by the in sufficient pohtical justice which is meted out to them. The Social-Democracy is a reform party of Utopian 128 GERMAN WORLD POLICIES radicahsm and nothing more. It has lost its acute danger for the state since the attempt has been aban doned of placing it under exceptional laws. It has, moreover, mixed its revolutionary elements with so much claptrap that it has captivated the masses. At first glance this seems to have strengthened it. Ac tually, however, it has committed itself to a fatal course, for it wiU be able to hold the masses only if it procures an ameUoration of their conditions within the existing form of government. And this will compel it to aban don its revolutionary dogmas. Irrespective of our Social-Democracy, aU the ignoble — or as Goethe would say — miserable traits of the German character appear in our system of poUtical parties. Bismarck has probably passed the severest possible judgment in this respect in his "Thoughts and RecoUections,"- when he says, "Everyone who has been in politics has observed that partisans whose personal good behavior and probity are above reproach in their private life, feel relieved from aU bounds which a sense for what is honorable and proper should dictate, as soon as they enter the political arena. They caricature the maxim that the welfare of the state is the highest law, and excuse on its score vulgarity and meanness of a type which would be disgusting to them under other conditions."^ Bismarck believes that this cutting loose from one's instinctive sense of honor and propriety STRENGTH AND WEAKNESS 1 29 is darkly connected with the feeling that the interests of one's party, which one substitutes for one's father land, demand a different standard from that of private life. How forceful is Bismarck's angry remark, "Who would gladly undertake the part of a conscienceless calumniator anywhere but on the political battle-ground? But as soon as one can find the excuse before one's own conscience and one's fellows that everything is done in the interest of the party, then every mean act is per missible or at least excusable." The German is capable of truly great achievements only in the form of individual genius, or when he has to submit, to severe discipline in company with hordes of others. The free communion of work done by people who voluntarily organize for this purpose is not char acteristic of the Germans. The opposite is true of the English whose very nature induces them to do their best in voluntary and natural forms of organization.. The parhamentary parties, therefore, whose success depends on a wholesome sense of the welfare of the whole, are apt to show in Germany an inferior charac ter, whUe in England they remain true to the national idea, in spite of their occasional excesses during the elections. In the discussion of forces struggling agamst the future of the national idea, we are obhged finaUy to face the most difficult problem of all — the problem of 130 GERMAN WORLD POLICIES rehgion. The fact that we are divided into Protestants and CathoUcs has been discussed above, and its harm described. Here we are concerned with another ques tion. Are the churches — the Protestant as weU as the Catholic — capable of dealing with the demoralization of our national conscience owing to the idolatry of class distinctions, by awakening a strong Christian rehgious consciousness? Unfortunately we find that the sUght reUgious effect of both churches is due to the fact that both — the Protestant perhaps even more than the Catholic — administer their wealth of rehgious ideas con sciously or unconsciously in the interest of some social and privileged classes within the nation. The rehgious- democratic vein which is occasionally found in the German CathoUc church is struggling in vain against this tendency, and the inabiUty of our Protestantism to overcome our natural national sin is apparent when we compare it with that of the Anglo-Saxons. No American or EngUshman, not a member of the AngUcan High Church, could have coined as unchristian a word as our "Divinely decreed dependence" in matters poUtic. It is no accident that the reformed church has grown strong among the Anglo-Saxons, and the Lutheran church among the Germans. The latter appears from the first to be the church of princes and classes, and has remained so faithful to itself that the principle of worldly authority and class superiority STRENGTH AND WEAKNESS 131 has been better developed within its walls than any where else. The Swiss Calvinists, the English and Scotch Independents, the Puritans, and the Pilgrim Fathers who laid the foundation of the transatlantic strength of the Anglo-Saxons, all of them profess a rehgion much freer than others from the duties of servi tude to the privUeged classes. How different matters are in Germany! The German CathoUc and Protestant churches are religiously in effective for the very reason that they are the servants of the principle of class distinctions. As an organized' rehgion our churches have something to offer only to those classes who are interested in the preservation of the status quo. They meet the progressives with empty hands. The value of our German Protestantism for our na tional idea has never been due to any power it may have possessed of awakening a social consciousness in the nation, but to its insistence on the principle of the re Ugious independence of the individual. By this it has not actually accompUshed, but at least prepared the way for the Uberation of the German mind from the bonds of anti-Christian and unhistorical dogmas, and laid the foundation of our modern world of ideas in the philosophy of Kant, the man of Scotch descent who determined on German soil and with Protestant ma terial the absolutism of moraUty, the categorical impera- 132 GERMAN WORLD POLICIES tive. This act of creation had to be preceded by the destruction of the delusion that the moral forces are bound to the crutches of dogmatism, and it is to the credit of the German national character that it estab hshed our knowledge in this respect firm as an immov able rock. Perhaps it is enough if a nation has accom pUshed that much for the divine guidance of the race, and perhaps we expect the impossible of our German Christianity, if we blame it for having been unable to kiU also the snake which tempts us to disobey the laws of our national idea. CHAPTER V GERMANY ACROSS THE OCEAN Trying to grasp the meaning of the phrase "the Ger man idea in the world" from its material side, and reaUzing the strength which foreign nations draw from their colonies, we naturaUy regret that Germany has entered so late on her pohcy of colonization. The Eng Ush have founded powerful daughter-nations across the ocean, the Russians have, for centuries, extended their nation over vast territories which were inhabited by inferior races or not inhabited at all, and also the Spaniards, the Portuguese, and the Dutch have colonized important countries in foreign lands with their men, their ideas, and their tongues. We cannot, therefore, fail to be astonished if many of us ask, 'Are the German colonies of sufficient impor tance to deserve serious consideration in connection with our national idea?" The proper answer is, "Yes, they are and they wiU be so to a much larger degree soon, for the chapter of German colonization is by no means closed." It is nonsense, to be sure, for the English to suspect that we wish to conquer either South Africa or AustraUa or to colonize Mesopotamia and raise our 133 134 GERMAN WORLD POLICIES flag in BrazU. In Africa, on the other hand, German possessions may yet be vastly extended, and this wiU surely be done, possibly soon and at any rate sometime. It is not our intention to rob anybody, but one need not be a prophet, as matters are today, to foretell that the final drawing of lines between the African colonies is yet to come, and that it will be our duty to create a much larger African Germany before this time arrives. In speaking here of "colonies" from the point of view of the national idea, we must not tiiink of such German settlements as, e. g., those in South America which have become parts of foreign poUtical bodies. It should be our endeavor to keep in touch with them, but they can have no part in the poUtical manifestation of our national idea across the ocean. ''This can only be done by territories which are colonized under the flag and the protection of the empire. In aU probabiUty there fore, we shall have to confine ourselves here to the healthy highlands of southern and middle Africa which in part are ours now, and in part may yet become so. Experience has shown that the white man, even the north European such as the English and the Dutch, can take root there easily. One must, however, remem ber that the native element there will maintain itself by the side of the white, for it is not only able to adapt itself to the European settler, but is necessary to him to supply his labor. In North America and in AustraUa GERMANY ACROSS THE OCEAN 135 the aborigines and the settlers could not hve side by side, because the former were impervious to finer in fluences and desirous of maintaining only their wUd freedom and primitive social conditions. The attempt, therefore, to fit the Indians and the Australians into the new scheme of affairs was a failure and ended with prizes being put on the scalps of Indians, men, women, and chUdren, by the governments of New England, and with the endeavor of the farmers in New South Wales and Queensland to exterminate the black cattle thieves by throwing sheep poisoned with arsenic into the bush. The result has been that North America and Aus tralia have becorJie entirely the lands of white men," for the smaU remnants of the aborigines are of no con sequence. In Africa the extermination or the decay of the natives is impossible, excepting perhaps the few bushmen in the southwest who at present are giving us serious trouble. The native race as a whole, however, is physicaUy vigorous, and far enough advanced to be deemed an active factor in the economic Ufe of the colonies. If the fact of a division of labor between the white and the black people in our African colonies is thus estabhshed, it is obvious that the black must be the serving people, and the white constitute the upper classes. This is the state of affairs which we generally meet in the Anglo-Boer South African colonies. /This fact decrees that our African soil will be unable to ab- 136 GERMAN WORLD POLICIES sorb nearly as many white colonists as America was able to accommodate. The East African highlands and South Angola, which wiU be ours by agreement whenever Portugal seUs her possessions, offer in part very favorable opportunities for farming and other uses, unlike Southwest Africa where only an extensive management is possible. But even in the former territories the German colonies can never be built up on the example offered by our East German farm hands or West German smaU individual owners. The future farmer and estate owner near the Kilimandsharo, on the shores of Lake Njassa or on the highlands of Angola, will of course, take some part in the management of his property, but the real laborers and domestic servants and the inferior assistants in the workshop will aU be drawn from the colored races because they are numerous, physically strong and capa ble, and because their pay and keep are much cheaper than those of white laborers. We do not yet sufficiently know our African colonies, nor have we had sufficient experience in the equatorial highlands with the possibiUties of European accUmati- zation, to say with certainty how many Germans may five in future on the Atlantic side of South Africa, in East Africa, and in Kamerun. Probably there wiU be more than the sceptical believe, for great advances have already been made in combating the various cU- GERMANY ACROSS THE OCEAN 137 matic diseases, and still more wiU surely be made. It is Ukely that the descendants of our present settlers will not be able to pour as much alcohol down their throats as their ancestors in Germany used to do, but even for most Germanic people alcohol is more a question of luxury than of necessity. Let us assume — in order to name a figure within the bounds of probability, however fantastic it may seem to some — that one or two mUlion Germans wiU inhabit Africa, at a time which we of today, to be sure, shaU not Uve to see. Such a number will mean infinitely more, economically, than the same number of people anywhere in Germany itself, because these one or two miUions represent only the upper classes of owners, while the sum total of hard labor which at home is also performed by white men, is entirely in the hands of the black, and culturaUy because the greater prosperity and the stronger self-confidence of the upper classes will render them spirituaUy more effective than any average miUion of people at home. Nobody who knows colonial countries wiU maintain that a fine spirit or aesthetic culture is characteristic of them. The colonial type is, nevertheless, a source of great inner wealth for any nation which develops it successfully. It is natural that not the lazy and timid, but the active and determined men of a nation find their way across the seas, which selection explains 138 GERMAN WORLD POLICIES much in the American character. We have already shown that the German labor at home is fully capable of feeding our people in spite of their increase. It is, therefore, no longer the thought, for his daily bread which sends a German forth, but the love of enterprise and the desire of shaping his Ufe along broader and freer lines than is possible at home. In view of our very large numbers it is of no consequence if several thousand people leave home annuaUy, even if they are ever so strong and capable. Across the ocean, however, the selection gradually produces a race of special quaUties. It is freer from the prejudices of class distinction, which are poisoning our Ufe at home, more independent in meeting altered conditions, and better accustomed to Uving on a big scale both without and within. A nation Uke the English has a tremendous advantage over us by the transatlantic influence on its character of its great and powerful colonies, and because many of its chUdren spend much of their life across the ocean, as soldiers, civil officers, business men, and the like. This results in a general broadening of the inteUectual horizon of the whole nation. Something Uke this, but unfor tunately not nearly enough, is gradually beginning to happen also with us. It wiU be of greater importance and be more far-reaching, as soon as the connections be tween the fatherland and the colonies grow to be more intimate. \/The possibiUty of the German colonists in GERMANY ACROSS THE OCEAN 139 Africa developing into new nationaUties, Uke those of Canada or of Australia, is precluded for some time to come because the foundations in Africa are not laid on a sufficiently big scale. We mentioned above that the decision to look for a new home in distant lands corresponded with most modern German settlers to their longing for an escape from what is circumscribed to what is big and unhmited. Many of our settlers did not at first think of a perma nent stay in Africa, when they went there as soldiers, officials, or merchants. But when they came to know Africa they began to love it. Maybe the severity and grandeur of the country appealed to them. Maybe the demands which it makes on everyone who wishes to live there agreed with their own nature : an independent character and the readiness to shoulder the responsi bihty of every individual act. Others, on the other hand, formed their ideal at home, and went forth con sciously to reahze it. These settlers are drawn from a variety of social spheres, but one thought unites them, namely to create for themselves a better home than German conditions permit, with whatever means are theirs, money or ability to work, or both. Freedom and independence! Let a man choose his fate and fashion it according to his abiUty; this is the colonial ideal. Pleasure in the reaUzation in a strange land of the aim of one's voUtion fosters the colonial feeling of self- 140 GERMAN WORLD POLICIES confidence. This one word, self-confidence, is the kernel of the whole colonial psychology. Not only our men, but also our women in Africa noilice with satisfaction the absence of that restraint which at home is due to the demands of social sets and habits. Such a sense of freedom may be a source of moral danger for some people, whUe it develops with others forcefulness without and within. There is in spiration even for people who at home would have withered, in the thought that they are the sole arbiters of their own actions and their choice of associates. This race of colonists wiU be yet freer and more spon taneous when a generation of men and women wiU have arrived who were born and brought up there and who always have breathed the free air of Africa. The man who knows our colonies wiU not commit the error of beUeving that the German colonial character ' of today is free from all faults. It lacks proportion and is pig-headed and greedy, for it is tempted to regard its own interests as paramount. Our colonists expect that the government, the fatherland, parUament, the press, .and everybody should combine to work in the interest of a few thousand settlers. Yet, consciously or uncon sciously, there is some justice in this wish. Since much depends on the speedy development of a strong trans oceanic German type, its beginnings deserve the fos- GERMANY ACROSS THE OCEAN 141 tering care of the mother country even if the colonists behave rather badly at times. For the first time in the history of the world produc tive labor is now entering those countries in which for untold millennia barbarians and primitive people have eked out an existence. The fields, the steppes of South Africa, there they lie as nature created them. On the soU which the German farmer has bought, aborigines have for countless ages spent Uves equally useless to the culture and the social economy of the world. The Hereros have bred their cattle, drunk sour milk, and dug roots, or Bushmen have been prowhng about, hunting with poisoned darts or setting their snares. Where the Bantu or the native Pygmy pastures his cattle and places his traps, no white man can settle a farm. It is not right either among nations or among individuals that people who create nothing should have a claim to preservation. No false philanthropy or race-theory can prove to reasonable people that the preservation of any tribe of nomadic South African Kaffirs or their primitive cousins on the shores of Lakes Kiwu or Victoria is more important for the future of mankind than the expansion of the great European na tions, or the white races as a whole. Should the German people renounce the chance of growing stronger and more serviceable, and of securmg elbow room for their sons and daughters, because fifty or three hundred 142 GERMAN WORLD POLICIES years ago some tribe of negroes exterminated its pred ecessors or expelled them or sold them into slavery, and has since hved its useless existence on a strip of land where ten thousand German famihes may have a flourishing existence and thus strengthen the very sap and force of our people? Our average settler in Africa is working with grim determination and energy, in spite of many setbacks, errors, and disappointments, and after all with much practical success. Many a one is there today pros perous, experienced, strong, blessed with a wife and many children, to whom he is able to leave in abun dance land, cattle, and other property. What would have become of him at home, if he had to pass the even ing of his Ufe in some small town with his monthly civil pension in his pocket, or if he had remained a laborer in one of our huge factories, or a small artisan? These are the really determining thoughts which we must keep in mind when we speak of the national value of our colonies. Our colonial administration, therefore, should consistently and consciously follow the path which leads to such results. Five years ago we experienced a great advance in our colonial office, and it is not our intention to detract one iota from the credit due to the great statesman with whose name x pubhc opinion associates this improvement. The ethic 1 [Dr. Bernhard Demberg. Translator.] GERMANY ACROSS THE OCEAN 143 national importance of our colonies, however, did not get its deserts under him. He defined the desirable prosperity of our colonial endeavors to be "that a num ber of inhabitants adequate to the inhabited area should develop aU possible economic forces, satisfy all reason able needs, translate the natural resources into market able commodities, and find facilities to place them with out much loss in transit on the markets of the world, and continue to develop peacefully in keeping with the conquests of modern science." This definition is not wrong, but it is materialisticaUy one-sided. It does not mention that the aim and end of colonization both as a whole and in detail, must be determined by its reference to the national idea. This means that the highest aim of colonization is the increase of the ideal and material resourcefulness and activity of our peo ple. But who can count the amount of money we had to pay for our instruction in colonial matters before we gained our present knowledge? When the first African territories became German almost thirty years ago, we were in no way prepared for colonial activities. It was, therefore, unavoidable from the first that mistakes should be made, but these mistakes grew to be so big and formidable that we are stiU suffering from their effect. Nobody knew that territories across the sea which were in so primitive a condition as East or South- V 144 GERMAN WORLD POLICIES west Africa or Kamerun, needed considerable sacri fices of money, experience, and patience before they were able to yield anything. How great was the lack of a true realization of African affairs which induced Chan- ceUor Count von Caprivi — an otherwise most deserving man — to say, he would give the Southwest African colony one more year of grace before seriously considering its sale to England! What could possibly be changed in one year, when there was no German force in Africa to put a stop to native warfare, no railway to open the country, no settlers, no capital, no administration to make farms of bush and steppe — and in Berhn no man in the colonial office who knew from practical experience that every calf born on a settler's farm needed at least three or four years before it could be used to draw the plow or be sold as beef? The government gave away, for nothing or for very Uttle, arable land, mines, and concessions of every con ceivable kind to German or foreign corporations who had either no money or no initiative or neither the one nor the other. In parUament the several parties vied with each other in ignorance, prejudice, and pettiness whenever demands were made in the interest of de veloping and strengthening the new possessions. And whenever the pubUc showed any interest in the colonies, it was not because of their importance for our national future, but because of some scandal which ignorance GERMANY ACROSS THE OCEAN 145 and hatred had attached to the people who were risking their Uves across the seas. Today the helplessness of the government of that time in deaUng with the com plaints, requests, and suggestions which came from the colonists is almost inconceivable. Since then a notable progress has been made. Dur ing the first period, from the acquisition of most of our colonies to the administration of the colonial director, Dr. Stiibel, our total colonial commerce had grown to fifty-eight million marks, of which unfortunately only seventeen millions represented the exports while forty- one millions were paid for imports. These figures are exclusive of Kiautschou, which from the start was ad ministered by the navy department. Fifty-eight mil Uon marks is so Uttle that it is not astonishing when people opposed to the principle of colonization, ex plained their negative attitude by pointing to these smaU proceeds. As a matter of fact, however, it was a sign of such short sightedness on their part that it ap pears incomprehensible to us today, that people ex pected progress of our colonies without raUways or invested capital, and used the natural absence of progress as an argument in the discussion of colonial affairs. A fundamental change in our colonial misery was made by Dr. Stiibel, who was a man weU versed in transoceanic matters. He knew that capital, raU ways, and settlers were needed, and he succeeded in 146 GERMAN WORLD POLICIES laying the foundation of a brighter future in aU these respects. His deserts are not nearly enough appre ciated. None of his successors thus far has drawn so much private capital into Africa as he did. At a time when the parUamentary majority was still of anti- colonial tendencies he wrested from it appropriations for almost as many mUes of railway, as parUament granted under the pressure of colonial enthusiasm in 1907. Above eveiy thing he was the first to consider seriously the national principle of German coloniza tion, and recognized, and declared that the first need of the acquired territories was their settlement by Ger man farmers. By continuing along the lines laid down by Dr. Stiibel, our colonies were able to show in 1910 an export of ninety-four miUion and an import of one hundred thirty rjiUUon marks. If we include Kiautschou the sum total of our trade with the colonies amounts to about three hundred fifty million marks today, which is about four and one-half times as much as it was in 1900. If we study the figures of our colonial development in recent years, we see that the increased means of transportation are the cause of their improvement, and that we have only just begun our advance. Our most important African railways are only partly finished, others are in the process of building, while still others.. have not yet been started. If these beginnings have GERMANY ACROSS THE OCEAN 147 yielded so much, what may we not expect of the future, when the whole system of transportation wUl be com pleted, and a vigorous German colonization will have taken place also in East Africa! This principle of set tling the country with Germans must be vigorously pushed. It was a great mistake of our last epoch of colonial administration to lose sight of it, and/ to en courage a vague and dangerous pohcy of native settlers in East Africa which is our largest and most important colony. The very idea of giving the preference to a negro civUization when a settlement by white people is possible, contradicts the best experience in these matters. India is inhabited by three hundred miUion people of a colored race and of an old and compara tively high civilization, and in addition by several hun dred thousand white men belonging to the highest and most cultured classes of the world. Its entire commerce, however, exceeds that of Canada or of AustraUa* and New Zealand with its half a dozen million of white colonists only in the ratio of three to two. One Canadian or Australian inhabitant is economically forty times as valuable as a Hindoo, and how far behind the power of production and consumption of India are the countries of the African negroes! If purely economic considerations, therefore, demand the colonization of Africa by white men, the national idea itself should compel it. Only where proof exists 148 GERMAN WORLD POLICIES that white settlers cannot or probably will not thrive, may it be permitted to deviate from this principle. It is generally not necessary to advance cash to the pro spective German settlers, but they must be assured of cheap land, good transportation, an abundant supply of native labor, and some credit. A colonization which does not succeed under such conditions, cannot suc ceed at aU, and would be a mistake. Let the govern ment, the lawmaking bodies, and public opinion work together that things may be done on a grand scale with insight and intentional benevolence. If this is done we shaU experience a colonial prosperity which will soon out-distance even the rosiest hopes of our early colonial optimists. What are the prospects that our colonial secretaries wiU realize the proper demands of our national idea and shape their course to the end that the German idea may find its fuU growth in those territories which are under their control? If we look for an answer in the annals of the past, our hopes cannot be very high. First, we haer a period of colossal ignorance and sterihty. Then the head of the office correctly saw what was needed, but he had to fight with a pubUc opinion at home, which developed only very slowly, and he met much opposi tion among the colonists themselves. The third epoch ushered in an increased interest at home and a cordial participation of aU the parties, ample means, and a GERMANY ACROSS THE OCEAN 149 vigorous initiative. But the man who guided the fate of the colonies pursued too exclusively the commercial and capitalistic idea of development. He disregarded the national principle and the immovabiUty of the colonial character. His final failure was due to his self-willed obstinacy and his refusal to work hand in hand with the colonists. The regime which followed was of too short a duration to admit of a definite ver dict, although one can hardly faU to charge it with a lack of initiative and decision in the acute questions which arose. Now we are standing again with renewed hopes at the beginning of a new era. The things which must be done for our colonists are after all not so very difficult. If we accept the correct principle laid down by Dern- burg that the expenses for the military protection of the colonies should be borne by the empire which acquired these distant territories, then our African, and a part of our South Sea possessions, are today in a position to supply almost wholly the sums needed for their ad ministration and the payment of interest on the capital advanced to them by the empire. It is hardly neces sary to point to the fact that the white people pay al most all the taxes, duties, and other assessments, and that in so far as the negroes have any part in these pay ments they have been enabled to do so by the activity of the white people. 150 GERMAN WORLD POLICIES Formerly when the colonists called for seff-govern- ment, they were told, first pay for yourselves and then govern yourselves. Today this question has become acute in Southwest Africa, and almost so in East Africa. Southwest Africa yields more than it costs, excepting of course the miUtary expenses; and some raUways are actuaUy being built with the balance in the treasury. Naturally, therefore, the German colonists are giving voice to the Anglo-Saxon slogan: No taxation without representation. The complaint of the people is just when they say, we were told that we should have self- government when we could pay our own expenses. We are doing this now, but are denied self-government. Southwest Africa has a council of which half the mem bers are elected and the other half appointed by the governor, so that it 6an hardly be said to be a represent ative body. Its authority, moreover, is confined to an expression of opinion when the annual budget is made up, and when the governor chooses to submit to it other matters of local interest. We do not deny that a certain moral influence is thus assured, but it is of a doubtful nature. It lacks the necessary freedom and consequently a fuU sense of responsibiUty. The colonists have undoubtedly the right to determine how the money raised by their taxes should be spent, and they should not be invited to express merely an opinion which is not binding. The colonial office has the legal right to GERMANY ACROSS THE OCEAN 15 1 ignore the moral weight of this opinion, but if it exer cises it, it cannot expect the pohtical atmosphere and the general condition of South Africa to be in a very satisfactory state. We meet here again the old fault of our official au thority which finds it exceedingly difficult to have con fidence in the abifity and loyalty of the people. Put the Southwest Africans in the saddle. They will know how to ride. But if we keep them tied to a leading- string, their feeUng of annoyance will continue, and if things do not go as they should go, the responsibility for this will rest on the government and not on the colony and its inhabitants. The events of the Dernburg ad ministration have sufficiently shown the error of refus ing to the colonists a voice in the administration of their internal affairs. In the same way what is called self-government and is offered to the East Africans under this name is almost a mockery. If the govern ment reaUy harbors such mistrust against the East African colonists, it would have been better and more sincere if it had said so, and if it had refused not only actual self-government but also its useless substitute on paper. The real malady under which our colonial adminis tration is suffering is the unconscious antipathy of the German bureaucracy to any readjustment in questions of principle. This is due to the fact that the under- 152 GERMAN WORLD POLICIES standing and practical experience in our pubhc service proceeds almost wholly from the estabhshed round of our Ufe at home. Within these limits a treasure of well tested ideas and conceptions has been gathered and this has resulted in a very definite routine and a feehng of self-satisfaction. The conviction has gained ground that without the formaUty of the law and the juristic atmosphere of our high Prussian-German officials, no body can administer anything. Our officials are so afraid lest a matter should be conducted not entirely according to the estabhshed formahties that they can not bring themselves to appoint men to important posi tions in the colonial office who might deviate from the accepted scheme. It is, however, most remarkable that legal precision was absent just where it was most needed, in the many concessions and contracts with corpora tions and individuals. These were unduly numerous in the first years of our colonial pohcy, and they are generaUy couched in such uncertain terms and are so fuU of mistakes that great blame attaches to our colonial administrators. Even those of the Dernburg period are no exception to this rule. One might think that this should teach us the lesson that colonial affairs offer a sphere of unique experiences and requirements for which our home-training is insufficient. Special jurists are needed to solve the colonial problems, and specialists are needed, although not exclusively, for the adminis- GERMANY ACROSS THE OCEAN 1 53 tration of our colonies abroad. The English practice teaches this very clearly, for the EngUsh supplement their colonial self-governments with men of practical experience and no previous legal training. Above everything the men at the head of our colonial office should realize that a colonial pohcy is Jundamen- taUy different from a policy in home affairs, and that extreme care is required in transferring methods and conceptions from the one sphere to the other. This is self-evident for an Englishman who has the opportunity of continuaUy observing the difference between trans atlantic and home affairs. The English poUcy, there fore, is not at aU opposed to making use of the colonists in responsible administrative offices, granting them an active and not merely a nominal voice in the conduct of their affairs. An Englishman holds as a self-evident truth that colonists are able to advise and act ably in any administration which concerns their own welfare. It is true that the EngUsh policy did not hold this rea sonable view from the very beginning, and that it was not spared the unfortunate results of its early mistakes. But it has learned its lesson. Our own colonial affairs have severely suffered be cause our government did not think it sufficiently neces sary in the very beginning to go to school to the older colonizing nations, notably England. The amount of objective ignorance and subjective mediocrity which 154 GERMAN WORLD POLICIES distinguishes our earliest colonial policy is almost be yond beUef — and yet the disgrace might have been avoided if our officials had been given the opportunity of making thorough administrative and theoretical studies in the English possessions. The advantages, however, and the necessity of such a course were so ahen to the conception of our officials, that hardly any body thought of it. Whenever occasionally something was done in this direction, it was too Uttle systematic and had almost exclusive reference to special questions of momentary importance. The idea that one should leave the general develop ment of distant territories, either protectorates or colo nies as much as possible to the settlers themselves and confine the government through the home office to the maintenance of public order and the supply of those means which no young colony can furnish of itself, is so alien to our method that sight is often lost of the most important aim, which is to foster in every possible way the independence of the colonial population. It is of course impossible to achieve anything, if one is stingy in supplying the necessary capital. But if one declines to make investments, and in addition claims supervi sion of every independent act abroad, the result wiU be even worse. Our officials abroad are by no means all mediocre. There are men of a variety of experience and antecedents who have proved their worth, shown GERMANY ACROSS THE OCEAN 1 55 knowledge of the special needs of African life, and won the confidence of the inhabitants. If they could be assured good pay and continued employment, it would be easy to form the backbone of a successful adminis tration. The fact that the subaltern and lower officials are precluded from rising to the higher positions is especially unfortunate. It is a sign of our narrow-mindedness that even men of importance cannot reach the influential positions unless they belong to one of our upper castes. The very existence of such an opportunity would at tract gifted men and be to the advantage of our colonies. But it is repulsive to the German principle of the di vinely decreed division between upper and lower social classes. If one visits our trans-oceanic possessions and sees there the ridiculous workings of our official castes, the social and official distinctions and prejudices which one knew at home but wliich there appear augmented because conditions are on a much smaUer scale, one is almost tempted to despair. One feels as if we should never be able to amount to much in colonial affairs, because most of us look upon the limitations of our life at home as our most valuable and personal possession, which we must carefully carry with us across the ocean into the very steppes and mountains of Africa. One gains courage, however, when one realizes how much has been accomplished in spite of these Umitations. 156 GERMAN WORLD POLICIES Yet, how much more we could accomplish, if we had a broader horizon and were free of the home restrictions of conception, voUtion, and habit! Everywhere we meet the defects of our national ten dencies and education which prevent us from doing with our men and our energy and our wealth what other people of a freer mode of thought would do if they were in our place. A sense of duty and conscientiousness in details are two prerequisites of national grandeur, but alone they cannot achieve grandeur. They must be supplemented by independent thinking and independ ent acting. One must be free from the force of pre cedent, custom, and prejudice. We have the living proof in the achievements of some of our great men that we can see what is right in spite of our natural and his torical Umitations. However insignificant our colonies may be today compared with the possessions which England Or France enjoy across the seas, their impor tance for the development of the German idea in the world may be enormous if we ultimately succeed in turning from the narrowness of doubts and vacillation to the breadth of a vigorous confidence in Germany and the Germans across the sea. It is our firm con viction that the great epoch of our colonial pohcy in Africa is stUl to come. CHAPTER VI OUR FOREIGN POLICY Clausewitz, our great philosopher and historian of war has said: "The best strategy is to be strong always, not only generaUy, but particularly at the critical mo ment." War, however, according to the correct def inition of Clausewitz, is not a thing by itself but the continuation of a previous policy/ War and poUcy are different expressions of the same principle. The prin ciple is the material and moral self-preservation of a nation. It is, therefore, not only )the best strategy but also the best policy to be strong always, not only gen erally, but particularly at the critical rhoment. No body, however, can be so strong that he is the equal of a combination of his opponents. It is, therefore, the great art of policy to search for all those relations to other people by whose cultivation we increase our own strength and decrease that of our opponents. Modern history has produced two great masters in the art of poUcy, Bismarck and Edward VII of Eng land. Bismarck knew how to make our position in Europe unassailable by means of the triple alliance and the partial treaty with Russia, as long as Germany re- 157 158 GERMAN WORLD POLICIES mained an unexpansive power. This was seemmgly stUl true in 1890. A decade later when King Edward ascended the throne it had become apparent that the foundations of our existence had changed. If England wished to pursue her old pohcy of "British Supremacy," she was in consequence obhged to see. to it that Ger many was restrained and rendered harmless. The king pursued his thought from the first. It became necessary to eliminate, as a precautionary measure, any lurking interference by Russia. This nation was striving to reach a position by way of China and Persia which would have given it the pofitical control of Asia, if it had succeeded, and made it a menace to India. England obviously could not run the danger of a con flict with Germany as long as the Russian pohcy was pursuing these ends in Asia. This explains the treaty between England and Japan immediately after the Boer War. Japan was to be England's soldier in Asia, as Prussia had been her soldier one hundred and fifty years earlier in Europe. We know how thoroughly the Japanese did their work; only too thoroughly for the interests of England, which wished to see Russia suf ficiently weakened to thwart her Asiatic flights, but had not dreamed of having her placed hors de combat for some time to come. After the battles of Tsuchima and Mukden had been fought and the Russian revolution was over, Russia OUR FOREIGN POLICY 159 was ready for a treaty with England in which she re nounced the free access to the Pacific Ocean and was granted first claim on the northern part of Persia and a part of Turkey, when the time of Turkish partition should arrive. In the meanwhile France and Italy had been won, the former wholly, the latter in part; one by Morocco and "revenge," the other with the Albanian- Adriatic bait. Spain also was induced by a royal mar riage and hopes of North Morocco to entrust her navy for reorganization purposes to England, and to promise England free access to her ports in case of need. Por tugal had been an EngUsh vassal for years. As regards Germany EngUsh policy would surely have been satisfied if we should have been wiUing to accept its decisions without an appeal to arms. But since France had been won over partly by the hope of regaining Alsace-Lorraine, and since Italy's expecta tion of conquests across the Adriatic could not be realized without directly endangering the vital interests of Aus tria, it was quite impossible that this pohcy of isolating Germany could be successfuUy carried out without a war. England's purpose was the creation of a soUd and unbroken empire from South Africa to AustraUa, and the division of Turkey. Germany was to have no voice in the necessary rearrangements. If she ob jected, she was to be deprived of her African posses sions, of her fleet, and if possible also of Alsace-Lorraine. 160 GERMAN WORLD POLICIES The three keys for the understanding of this policy are to be found in Mesopotamia, Egypt, and East Africa. The German share in East Africa is the only interruption of a boundless EngUsh Empire which, without it, would extend from the Cape of Good Hope to the Mediterranean coast of Egypt. Portuguese East Africa is even today Uttle more than an English de pendency, and wiU probably find its way to the EngUsh flag before long in any case. Catanga in the southeast corner of the Kongo state, which is rich in minerals, is another object of English hopes, and explains why England has not yet recognized the Kongo state as a Belgian colony. Abyssinia and the worthless Itahan SomaUland are of no consequence for the great British policy in Africa. German East Africa, however, is an absolute necessity for the consummation of this plan. Ever since Cecil Rhodes had the first opportunity of speaking to Emperor William II of his African poUcies and his plans for trans- African railways and telegraph lines, hints have come from England in large numbers that she would be willing to pay even a very high price for German East Africa. But big as these projects are, her plans and hopes regarding the Turkish province of Bagdad, the ancient Babylon, are still more far-reaching for the poUtics of the world. Assuming that the southern part of Persia and the Persian gulf are destined to be a part of the OUR FOREIGN POLICY l6l British Empire, and that also Arabia will succumb to a vigorous English influence, then Bagdad wUl remain the only foreign wedge between the Egyptian-African and the Indian-Asiatic parts of the great British world empire. It was, therefore, natural that indications of the EngUsh projects to make of the Indian Ocean and the surrounding countries one huge empire appeared simultaneously in various places as soon as the im- periaUstic poUcy of England had begun -to take its high flights with the accession of Edward VII to the throne. While the way was prepared for the treaty with Japan which should compel Russian consent to the British acquisition of Southern Persia, Lord Curzon, the viceroy of India from 1899 to 1905, proclaimed the British su premacy over the middle Orient, and WUlcocks, the famous authority on waterways, dehvered in Cairo his sensational lecture on the restoration of the ancient civUization of Babylon by Great Britain. In the course of this lecture it appeared that officers in the Indian army had already prepared plans of all the old water ways, canals, locks, and dams in the Irak. In speaking of the Nahar Malka, the Babylonian canal of Kings, WUlcocks raised the very important question: ShaU this canal in future be known as the canal of the German emperor or of the emperor of India? He also advo cated that after irrigation the depopulated areas of this old country should be settled with farmers from 162 GERMAN WORLD POLICIES India and Egypt, that is, with British subjects. When a man of such pubhc importance as WUlcocks expressed thoughts which barely disguise the projected annexa tion of the country of the Tigris and Euphrates, it must be clear that the ultimate aim of England is nothing less than the absorption into the empire of all the coun tries between the Nile and the Indus. [The foUowing references to Turkey were written in the Spring of 1912, several months before the Balkan War. The complete defeat of Turkey has raised just doubts of her abiUty to reform herself. It must, however, be remembered that the process of Turkish reorganiza tion had barely begun when the united attack was made upon her by the aUied Balkan States and the Greeks. The Turkish army, moreover, contained many I soldiers from the very provinces which the aUies were fighting to free from Turkish rule. The figures are given as one Christian to every three Turks. It is im possible to judge how much these hostile soldiers in the Turkish ranks contributed to the defeat. While the author's complimentary references to the Turks may seem astonishing, his estimate of the Turkish char acter, which is based on first-hand observation, may nevertheless be more accurate than it has appeared to many. It must also be remembered that the author finds the strength of Turkey in her Asiatic provinces, and that OUR FOREIGN POLICY 1 63 her strength there has remained intact; and finally that his discussion of the German idea in the world is not dependent on either the strength or the weakness of Turkey. For these reasons and because the author himself, when this translation was made, was spending the winter in the interior of Africa, far removed from any means of communication, and unable, therefore, to make any changes in these pages, his references to Turkey are given just as he penned them before the recent developments of the Balkan War. — Ed.] At that time nobody beheved that Turkey was ca pable of such a vigorous poUtical and mUitary reor ganization as she achieved a Uttle later. On the con trary it seemed feasible, provided no European power objected, to restrict the Turkish government to Asia Minor, to assimilate the rest of the Turkish possessions to the British sphere of interest in one way or another, and to transfer the cahphate of Constantinople to Mecca or to Cairo. NaturaUy England would have had to assume, under these conditions, the protectorate over the two holy cities and the whole of Arabia. It would have been of secondary consideration whether the Khe dive of Egypt or the Great Sheriff of Mecca received the title of caliph and with it the nominal rule over all the faithful. In either case he would have been a vassal of England. 164 GERMAN WORLD POLICIES When England occupied Egypt in 1882 in order to secure her. dominion over the Suez canal and the gates to the Indian ocean, her responsible men were of course conscious ^ of the fact that they were assuming a posi tion which was assailable by land via Asia Minor and Syria. This possibiUty was the more far-reaching as Egypt was assigned, from the first, the position of the keystone in the arch of the empire which was to be formed about the Indian ocean. England's great South Asiatic-Indian sphere of influence is, under modern conditions, untenable if the only approach to it is around the Cape of Good Hope, where the African Boers are making their rapid political strides today. The pos session of Egypt, moreover, includes that of the Sudan to the sources of the Nile, and also the control of the Red Sea and its coasts. Ibrahim Pasha, the stepson of the great rebel Mehemet AU, made his way in 1832 from Egypt through Syria and the passes of the Taurus to Conia in the highlands of Asia Minor. There he vanquished with troops trained by European masters the army of the Sultan, and it is likely that the whole rule of the Osmans in Western Asia would have col lapsed if the European powers had not interfered. The same way, but in an opposite direction, can again be traversed by a modern army, and it is this thought which pains England in her oriental poUcy of today. This explains her continued delay in matters of the OUR FOREIGN POLICY 165 Bagdad railway, and her wish to ensure the protection of Egypt, and a land connection between the Nile and the Indus by absorbing Arabia, parts of Syria, and the country about the Tigris and the Euphrates. In Eng lish eyes the railway from Cairo to Calcutta is the coun terpart of that from Cairo to the Cape. What German East Africa is in one direction, the Arabic Irak is in the other. WiUcocks has not only proposed the plan of rehabiUtating this country with English money and knowledge, and of colonizing it with Mohammedan sub jects of Great Britain, but he has even prescribed the course of a railway. It might also be called a Bagdad raUway but it would serve the EngUsh, and not the Turkish interests. It would leave Bagdad in a westerly direction, cross the Euphrates by Deir es Zor and the Syrian-Arabic desert in a general direction toward Palmyra. From here it would be carried to Damaskus or Beirut or to TripoUs in Syria. The railway would start somewhere near the Persian guff, that is to say a British shore according to English ideas, and end be tween Cyprus and Egypt, the two strongholds of Eng land in the eastern Mediterranean. Such a road would be useless to Turkey both from a miUtary and a poUtical point of view. It would even be dangerous because neither of its terminals would be subject to Turkish control. The German-Turkish Bagdad road, on the other hand, which wiU run from the Bosphorus through 1 66 GERMAN WORLD POLICIES the whole of Asia Minor, Northern Syria, and Mesopo tamia down to Bagdad is intended to knit closely to the central government in Asia Minor and Constan tinople those parts of the Turkish empire which at pres ent are more or less removed from its control. When the road in about two years wiU have Reached Aleppo, the capital of Northern Syria, the connection wiU have been made with the Syrian-Arabic raUway system which has been completed in one direction down to Mecca, and in the other to Haifa at the foot of Mt. Karmel near the Mediterranean coast of Palestine. This would mean that England would have to count with a Turkish attack on Egypt, if she should offend either Turkey herself or another power aUied with her. The distance from Haifa to El Cantara, where the an cient highway crosses the Suez canal, is four hundred kilo-meters, about as far as from BerUn to Frankfurt. The road goes in part through regions which are poor in water and vegetation, but it is level and easy. Across the last stretch, which is almost a desert, a movable mih tary raUway could easily be laid, and large numbers of troops be moved over it. The Turks have exceUent practice in this work, because the entire Mecca raUway has been laid by mihtary forces. It would, of. course, be even better if the Turks could carry out the plan proposed by the secretary of pubUc works in 1909. He suggested that another road be started from Rayak, OUR FOREIGN POLICY 167 which is the junction of the North Syrian and Beirut Damaskus roads, and to lay it south at first only to Gaza. We see how important it is for the Turks that their railway should reach Bagdad as soon as possible. It is not in their immediate interest to go beyond Bagdad, for. the economic needs there can be taken care of on the rivers and on spur tracks. The through service of mail and passengers between India and Europe would lessen the financial burden of Turkey to some extent, but it would necessitate the building of the long unprof itable part through the Arabian desert on the right bank of the Euphrates to Basra-Kuweit. The Irak, however, wUl be poUtically and strategically safe for the Turks as soon as their railway from the north will have reached Bagdad, and this will happen in 1916. If Bagdad is connected with Syria and Anatolia by an unbroken railway system, Turkey can successfully withstand any invasion from India, either by way of the Persian gulf, or by land over a Persian continua tion of the Indian raUway system as planned by England. Since 1900, the year when King Edward succeeded to the throne, WUlcocks expressed his ideas, and Lord Curzon proclaimed the English supremacy in the middle orient, matters have not really developed according to the EngUsh wishes. The Bagdad railway has made distinct progress, although owing to the EngUsh opposi- 168 GERMAN WORLD POLICIES tion only a slow one, and the Syrian-Arabic railways have been newly created. England was successful only in one point. She prevented the Turks in 1906, by threats of force, from building a branch road to the Mecca raUway from Maan to Acaba on the northerly shore of the Red Sea. This very incident, however, shows the care with which England is watching lest a strong base of attack on Egypt, however remote, be estabUshed. In the sphere of big pohtics in the meanwhile the EngUsh attempt to delay the Bagdad road by consist ently objecting to any improvement in the Turkish cus tomhouse, went hand in hand with their attempt com pletely to isolate Germany and Turkey. During the Russian- Japanese war the agreement with France was concluded on April 8, 1904, and two years after the peace of Portsmouth, N. H., the treaty with Russia was signed on August 31, 1907. The supposition that the pubhshed part of the English-Russian pact which re ferred to Persia was meant to hide a further agreement directed agamst Turkey and Germany has since proved to have been correct. As early as 1908 attempts were made to explode a mine in an especially dangerous spot in Macedonia. AU of us remember our tense concern when King Ed ward and Emperor Nicholas met in Reval on June 9, 1908. Many poUticians beUeved then that a European OUR FOREIGN POLICY 169 war was at hand. One does not betray a secret now if one tells here that at that time the fleets of several na tions, our own among them, were in a state of increased readiness. But the united action of Russia and England in Macedonia did not materiahze owing to the unex pected outbreak of the Turkish revolution. If it had materialized the whole Turkish question would have been reopened, partition would have followed, so England planned, with Arabia, Mesopotamia, and the southern part of Persia her own share, with Armenia, Kurdestan, and the northern part of Persia the share of Russia, and corresponding recompenses to those nations who foUowed suit, ^t is impossible to discuss here the early history of the rise of the Young Turks, but we can readily see what it has meant for European interna tional poUtics. The most apparent thing was the re markable output of great moral, miUtary, and poUtical force on the part of the Turks as soon as the pressure of tyranny and corruption was taken from them. While this did not astonish those who knew them, it was a complete surprise to everybody else. A casual observer might think that this revolution would have been serviceable to Enghsh interests, be cause the Uberal minded Young Turks were quite un aware of the English plans concerning the country be tween the Persian Guff and the Suez canal. During the revolution itself, moreover, a distinct preference 170 GERMAN WORLD POLICIES for England was noticeable, which was hailed as the mother country of freedom and which enjoyed what was called the prototype of all free parUamentary gov ernments. The nationahstic elements of Turkey, which are pohticaUy more or less centrifugal, especiaUy the Greeks and the Armenians placed their hopes in England as soon as the old order of things was swept away, nor 'would they have, been averse to realizing with England's help their dreams of complete poUtical autonomy. This the Young Turks recognized very soon to be a great danger, which they avoided by dealing wisely with the Armenians and rigorously rejecting aU the demands of the Greeks. Naturally a certain mistrust of England had to foUow not only in matters regarding the Bagdad raUway, but elsewhere. The feeUng toward Germany consequently grew more friendly. At the beginning of the revolution it was rather hostile*, because the Turks beheved that Germany was a reactionary power, and for this reason had given support to the tyranny of Abd ul Hamid II. Gradually, however, also the Young Turks realized that Germany was the only great power which had no anti-Turkish interests, but on the contrary had to wish for her own sake that Turkey might have a strong army and preserve her poUtical mdependence. Let us imagine what would have foUowed for Ger many if the crisis in the Orient had. materialized in the summer of 1908 in accordance with Enghsh inten- OUR FOREIGN POLICY 171 tions. Without depicting the political details, one may say that the severance of Macedonia from Turkey — for this was the purpose of the EngUsh-Russian plans — would have caused a general war in the Balkans. The Russians would have entered Armenia, hoping to reach the gulf of Alexandretta; England would have taken Bagdad, would have proclaimed the caUphate of Mecca or of Cairo, and would probably have united Syria either as whole or in part with Egypt. This union had often existed before, for the last time during the years from 1830 to 1840. The Osmans and the Sultan would have been confined to the Anatofian peninsula, possibly with, but perhaps also without Constantinople; while Italy would have been permitted to take her com pensation in Albania. This would have ^been in keep ing with the ItaUan wish to get a foothold on the other side of the Adriatic, a wish which undoubtedly was at the bottom also of the Montenegrin Royal marriage. , It is self-evident that neither Germany nor Austria- Hungary could have peacefully watched these things come to pass. The annihilation of Turkey-would have disturbed the equilibrium' of Europe in the interest of England and her friends to such' an extent that the -two isolated powers would have received a fatal blow to- their standing.,'' It is an absolute necessity for Ger many to be able to meet an English attack in the North 172 GERMAN WORLD POLICIES Sea by an aUiance with Turkey in the East. Austria- Hungary on the other hand, would have been seriously damaged if Italy possessed both shores of the Adriatic, and Russia and other powers controUed the subdivided Balkan States. In such a case Austria-Hungary would ¦have n6 access at aU to the market of the world except with the consent of a foreign nation. The consumma tion, therefore, of the English-Russian projects would have meant war for Austria and Germany, and not only in two directions, but in three, for it was the hope of regaining Alsace-Lorraine which, in addition to the control of Morocco, had drawn France into the train of England and her pohcy of isolating Germany. The Turkish revolution of 1908, therefore, prevented a crisis, of which no one can be sure that it would have taken the course outlined above, although this course would have been in keeping with English desires. An other crisis appeared in the autumn of the same year 1908, when Austria-Hungary decided to incorporate Bosnia into her empire. The tension was the greatest not between England and Germany, but between Austria and Russia. The whole affair, however, was decided by Germany's declaration to Russia that she would move "¦her troops as soon as our alUes or we ourselves beUeved the vital interests of Austria-Hungary endangered. Russia yielded before this declaration which many of her people misinterpreted as a threat and an unwar- OUR FOREIGN POLICY 1 73 ranted interference with their pohtical plans. This Russian retreat was the decisive moment of the recent pohtical era, for it revealed the one weak spot in the system of King Edward. The Japanese cure, prescribed by England, had so completely weakened Russia that it had~pot only been obliged to renounce her claims in Asia and enter a treaty with England but had even lost the ability to undertake any large miUtary-poUtical action in Europe. The Servian-Bosnian crisis also passed without war resulting from King Edward's poUcy of German isola tion, and one year later Edward VII died, on May 6, 1910. With him the controlling and superior force faded from the game! of Engfish politics. Even if lhe Turkish revolution and the failure of Russia were two great disappointments to the King, his great mind would undoubtedly have found other ways and means to steer the ship of England nearer the magnificent goal which from the first he had picked out for her. Death, how ever, removed the rudder from his hand.' Since then EngUsh affairs have been conducted by men who can dispose of a great fund of inherited pohtical wisdom and' count on the support of a remarkably weU developed national feeling, but not one of them towers above the rest as did Edward VII. , It would be impossible to assert that German pubhc opinion had fuUy understood the importance of these 174 GERMAN WORLD POLICIES world poUtical relations between Germany and Eng land. In many cases the known facts are too shght for a correct perception, and our press and educated classes are as yet too httle accustomed to foUow the detaUs of foreign events as if they concerned ourselves. But on the whole there exists a well defined feeUng among us that danger from England is threatening us. Everybody in Germany excepting the Social-Demo crats who cannot be instructed, the pacificists who are living in a Utopia of their own imagination, and a few credulous and inexperienced Anglophiles knows today that the English poUcy has weighed and made aU pos sible plans for a long while by which it might rid itseff of the German competition which is daily growing more dangerous for England. Nobody has instructed Ger many in this respect so weU as King Edward VII him self. N ' <" It is so important for us to understand the gradual development of the EngUsh animosity against us, an .- GERMAN WORLD POLICIES /'"The English people say, to be sure, that it was we and" riot the Americans who wished to attack them. This assertion can be caused by only two motives, either conscious hypocrisy, hunting for an excuse to attack us with a semblance of right, or insufficient poUtical "de- Uberation. The latter is probably the weightier cause.- Either we attack England and are beaten, then a na tional catastrophe is staring us in the face — or, the highly improbable and inconceivable' happens, and we actuaUy conquer the English fleet, although ours is only half as big, and are proceeding to force on England a disadvantageous peace. At'that moment a European coahtion against us is with absolute certainty an ac complished faot, destined to deprive us of the prize of victory. Not only France and Russia, but also our ally Austria-Hungary, together with Italy and all the minor states, could do nothing less than to unite against us as soon as a decisive German victory over England was impending, and before we assumed the dictatpr- ship of Europe. They would have to do it for the sake of their own self-preservation. To understand this, one needs only an elementary political knowledge. If England, nevertheless, makes official use of the notion that Germany might attack her, we may forgive the man on the street and the sensa tional press their ignorance of the poUtical ABC. But if poUticians of note and statesmen who are guiding the OUR FOREIGN POLICY 193 affairs of the nation, or after a change of parUamentary majorities may be caUed to such offices, express such ideas, they must not be astonished, if we begin to sus pect that England is not so much afraid of an attack by, us, as that she desires to make preparations for an attack on us. No German poUtician or statesman, no German paper or inteUigent man in Germany, has ever hinted or ex pressed the thought that we should build as large a navy as the English or even as large as that part of the EngUsh which is kept in home waters. What we need, and what we must have at all hazards with or without the good will of England, is a navy strong enough to endanger England's superior position on the sea, if she should attack us, even if the immediate outcome should be advantageous to her. We must have so many ships that the losses which England will sustain in put ting us down wiU deprive her of her naval superiority , over the other intact navies of the world. No English poUcy can risk this. Let the EngUsh build as many ships as they think necessary for their safety, but let them count with this fact once and for all, that we shall say :/We do not care how many ships you build, we shall and must build so many that it wUl be too dangerous for you to run the risk of an attack on us. From the German point of view this is so clearly a defensive poUcy that it is altogether impossible to impute to it aggres- 194 GERMAN WORLD POLICIES sive tendencies. It gives to England what is hers and cedes to Germany her own. If the EngUsh are not con tent, preferring to maintain their absolute "supremacy" even for an attack, they show that they wiU not acknowl edge our poUtical and national equaUty in the world. But then it is they, and not we, who are constantly turning the screw of increased armaments. Financially we shall be able for a long while yet to raise the means for battleships, cruisers, and whatever else is necessary for a naval war. The sacrifices which Prussia and other states and people have made in critical times are an entirely different thing from the taxes which even in an extreme case may be required of us. If, neverthe less, the day should come when not our financial abUity but our national readiness to make sacrifices gives out, and the majority of the German people prefer to save money in its defenses rather than to advance the Ger man idea in the world, weU, then we shaU have deserved no better fate than that the EngUsh shoot us down and proclaim to the people of Europe: Help yourself! Take your compensation from Germany wherever you wish! - ' A navy of the, first rank is the safest andN cheapest guaranty of- peace according to the president of the United States, who said this after the Russian' naval defeat by Tsuschima. The same thought was expressed two thousand years ago in the Latin proverb: Si vis OUR FOREIGN POLICY 1 95 pacem, para bettum — If you wish peace, prepare your self for war. This proverb has since been repeated count less times both sincerely and insincerely — But it is for aU that as true today as ever. There is no greater danger for a people than to be rich, and at the same time weak and badly armed. Even in poUtics it is true: Do not lead us into temptation. Eternal peace may, according to Moltke, be no beautiful dream, or it may be beau tiful, and come about sooner or later — but today con ditions in the world are such that the sense of self-pre servation shows itseff in each great nation in a natural impulse at expansion. This expansion stops only where it is met by other and contending national poUtical tendencies. We know that nature herself compels us, with or without our volition, to push the roots and fibres of Our economic life ever deeper into the world abroad. In doing this we are met by the suspicion, jealousy, hostility, and the special policies of other mighty people. If until now an outbreak ofdiostihties has been prevented, and often at the last moment, it is nowhere written that this will always be so. Under these con dition's how can we justify any- calculations as to how much less strong we should keep our defenses of our own free wiU?^ Is there any other reason than our strength why our opponents should spare us?,- Will England, France, and Russia hesitate to use their su- 196 GERMAN WORLD POLICIES us and our friends? What shall keep them from it? Would the desired revenge for 1870 restrain the French? Or their anxiety over our commerce and navy restram the EngUsh? Or would the Russians hesitate because of their antipathy against us, their anger at our faithful support of our ally, Austria-Hungary, or because they need a thorough reparation of their defeats in East Asia? Only as long as we are strong, the balance be tween desire and hesitation wiU be kept in the camp of our opponents. If we shaU no longer be strong or at least no longer seem to be^so, then the others wiU be impeUed as by an elemental force to remove from their midst an inconvenient nation. WhUe this is the true state of affairs there are yet patriotic Germans who dehberate whether it would "not be better to save mU lions and so risk thousands, of miUions and even the veryfuture of the German idea in the world ! Everything that has been said thus far may be summed up by repeating that as we are situated today nobody, no individual power nor probable combination of powers, can do us any harm except in conjunction with Eng land. In saying 'this we assume that our alliance with Austria-Hungary will continue as firm as it has been in the past. The correctness of this assumption is based on the fact that the German-Austrian protection is mutual. We are easily a match for France alone, and a Franco-Russian combination wiU automaticahy put OUR FOREIGN POLICY 197 the Austro-Hungarian army into action. Italy belongs nominaUy to the triple aUiance, but it is better not to speculate on her movements, because her pubUc opinion is uncertain, and her dynasty not sufficiently secure to be able to insist on carrying out a treaty in the face of a hostile pubUc opinion. From the present state of European poUcy, therefore, it foUows of necessity that whoever harbors plans against Germany must seek an understanding with England. England, on the other hand, has systematicaUy endeavored to gather into her camp whatever forces were inimical to our interests. If we are strong enough to keep England from attack ing us by sea, then we need not trouble about anything else. The only means, however, of accomphshing this, is a strong navy. If it suffices to keep England at bay, this very fact secures the peace of Europe. We can not and we must not deviate from this naval pohcy, which depends entirely on the Enghsh naval program. In this connection it was very fortunate for us that the experiences of the naval encounters between Russia and Japan induced England to adopt the dreadnought type of battleships. This type greatly depreciated all the older ships in any navy, and while it would have been a hopeless task for us, in the pre-dreadnought period to catch up even in a remote way with the tre mendous superiority of the EngUsh navy, the dread noughts gave as it were a new start on equal terms to 198 GERMAN WORLD POLICIES aU nations. To their misfortune the Enghsh people thought that they would preserve the absolute su periority in the construction of huge modern battle ships for a considerable length of time. But in this they were mistaken, for owing to the introduction of the dreadnought type we have caught up with them in the last six years to an extent which formerly would have appeared to be a fantastic improbability. Our relation to them in dreadnought strength is already shghtly better than 1:2, and if the definitely adopted scheme of our naval construction did not happen to contemplate a decrease of new ships in the next few years, this proportion would for the present be maintained. Our second factor of safety Ues in fostering our good relations with Turkey. The financial and general eco nomic strengthening of the Turkish empire, the con struction of raUways and above everything else a large weU armed and ready Turkish army, these would weigh so distinctly in our favor, if our opponents should break the peace, that the progress of Turkey must be a sub ject of great interest for us. If our pohcy, nevertheless, was not able to keep Italy from her attack on TripoU and to obviate the consequent serious compUcations for Turkey in her affairs both at home and abroad, it shows unfortunately that a nominaUy aUied power Uke Italy does not beUeve that German interests impose upon her any obUgatory considerations. OUR FOREIGN POLICY 199 Our present poUtical situation is doubtless subject to the interpretation that we are no longer so respected as we were in Bismarck's time,' and many people express their patriotic fear that we are no longer successful in anything. This much is correct, that our opponents at present are in a position to prescribe for us to a cer tain extent what we shall do, unless we are wilUng to break aU existing poUtical knots by a great war. Such a war, however, would in any case be so great a risk for our present achievements and for our future that we cannot decide on it, unless the opposing parties plan something which wiU either infringe our honor or irn-- peril necessities of our national existence — or by an attack on us will relieve us of the trouble of making a decision at aU. If this does not happen, our only possible poUcy toward England and the powers in her train is to be always armed to the full extent of our abiUty and to declare at the same time our inviolable readiness to have peace and a loyal understanding with our op ponents, provided they will give us a pledge that such an understanding wiU be sincere and lasting. The chief reason why our policy often seems to lack clearness is because it is difficult to define the policy required by the German idea. For England this is easy, because the idea of strengthening and increasing the great empire hves in the consciousness of all the people. The poUtically trained are working for a united empire 200 GERMAN WORLD POLICIES tfrom South Africa over Egypt, Persia, and India to AustraUa, and the masses are thinking of the suggestive force of the poUtical catchword: The world is rapidly growing EngUsh! Even states Uke Russia and France have great and universaUy popular tasks, the former looking toward Persia, East Asia, Constantinople, and the protectorate over the faithful, while the latter is thinking of revenge for 1870 and the big African colonial empire, Morocco! The aspirations of the Americans, finally, which include continents and oceans, are so simple that they need no elucidation. Compared with these big national ideas and aims, what is the aspect of the German idea, if it is transferred from the sphere of the imagination to that of a prac tical foreign pohcy? Perhaps it is instructive to pic ture first what our opponents imagine to be a possible task for us, and one which we had actuaUy undertaken. There we meet in the first place a notion in the Enghsh pubUc that we desired to carry on a war of conquest either in AustraUa or in South Africa, or in both places, in order to colonize them in our own interests. Others are imputing to us a simUar intention in the southern and eastern parts of South America, and the Enghsh press for years has sedulously striven to publish this idea among the Americans. It sounds incredible, but really there have been men of importance in England who have shared such wild and fantastic notions. To- day, however, only the man on the street and the sen sational press are stUl capable of experiencing an AustraUan or BraziUan nightmare in thinking of Germany. A third possibihty for us, and one which Englishmen who wish us weU often urge on us is said to be the ac quisition and colonization of Asiatic-Turkey, to be carried out possibly in conjunction with Austria-Hun gary. This proposition has been repeatedly made by so great an authority and friend of Germany as the ¦ former governor of Uganda and British Central Africa, Sir Harry Johnston. If you ask the EngUsh people either privately or in a pubUc poUtical discussion why they impute to us such fantastic extravagances, they are pretty sure to answer in the words of Governor Johnston: "We see the Germans herded together in a country which is not very large and not everywhere fertile, placed in North and Central Europe between France and Russia. In which direction shaU they ex pand? For it is obvious from the start that the Germans cannot long be satisfied with the two countries which comprise the two closely aUied empires, Germany and Austria-Hungary. You Germans may say as often as yon wish that you do not intend to make any. conquests. We cannot beUeve it, for we see only too clearly that /ou need an outlet, ff you are not to smother within four boundaries owing to your huge numbers." This 202 GERMAN WORLD POLICIES was the tespr of a* letter to the author from a great EngUsh_ statesman. In view of such notions the labor seems almost wasted in the attempt of elucidating to the EngUsh that Germany has not only no surplus, but an actual deficit of workmen, and consequently is stand ing in no need of an outlet. Barring the occasional unavoidable international crises, our economic life is so flourishing that it is able to absorb the whole enor-1 mous annual increase of our population, and in addition. imports large masses of foreigners. "Our entire trans atlantic emigration has for many years dropped down to about twenty thousand or thirty thousand people annually, while we are keeping at work at the same time a miUion of foreign laborers, Russians, Poles, Ruthenes, Slovaks, ItaUans, and Scandinavians," says Delbruck in discussing the question of German foreigm coloniza tion in the Preussische Jakrbucher of March, 191 2. It is therefore perfect nonsense to say that we are suffocating in pur numbers, because we have not the possibiUty of existence in our own country. England herself offers the instance of a country much more densely populated than Germany, with insignificant numbers of emigrants and enjoying the acme of eco nomic prosperity and poUtical power, because it is able to- provide its people with safe access to the markets of the- world. This and nothing else is what we need. If We have a navy which wUl keep our commerce from'de- OUR FOREIGN POLICY ' 203 struction we have no need of an outlet for our popula tion either now or in the immediate future. As to the Enghsh notions of our supposed intentions in Australia, South Africa, South America, and the Orient, we have already said that the first three plans are too absurd to deserve discussion. The plans con cerning AnatoUa and Mesopotamia are impossible, for even if we had a surplus of population for foreign colo nization, and if the climatic conditions made it possible for the German farmer to hve at the foot of the Taurus or on the banks of the Euphrates, qur consideration for Turkey would nevertheless forbid our thinking even remotely of an extensive German colonization on Turk ish soU. In spite of aU this it is worth while to look at our position in the world through EngUsh glasses, for it shows us what an Englishman expects of us as soon as he tries to think poUtical thoughts from our point of view. In reply to aU these notions we can give the sin cere assurance that all conquests of whatever kind and in whatever part of the world, are ahen to our aims and wishes. Africa is the only continent where our acquisi tions may be deemed susceptible of future extension. But even here we are contemplating no haste, and cer tainly no violence. On the contrary we expect that England, if her recent friendly advances are seriously meant, will join hands with us in our endeavor to reach a loyal and amicable understanding in all disputed ques- 204 GERMAN WORLD POLICIES tions in Africa, and a settlement equitable to aU third parties. v The pohcy of the German idea in the world, there fore, does not contemplate, according to our view, any conquest or violence. If it did this, it might count more readily on the sympathy of the masses. But since we cannot travel this road, both for ideal and for material reasons, our task is this: We must realize the idea of national expansion, on which our abihty to exist as a nation of the first rank depends, by making ourselves in the first place so strong on land and sea that nobody wUl dare to attack us, and secondly by working thus protected for the attainment of our great pacific aim. This aim is to permeate the world with the spiritual contents of our national idea. The countries which come under special considera- ¦ tion here are of course those which today are entering on a period of change and are under the influence of modern communication. The German national idea must develop Uke the Anglo-Saxon to be a truly world- transforming power, and must make also of Germany a mother country of the future civilization of the world both along moral and material lines. In acknowledging this to be our aim and determining to work for it, we gain nothing if we deceive ourselves as to the difficulties which we shall meet. They wiU not ^only be due to foreign hostility and jealousy, but largely" to our own weakness. OUR FOREIGN POLICY 205 With every nation which is of age pohticaUy the ex pansion of the national idea in the world is not only the part of its official pohcy, but also the duty of every individual. We have had frequent occasions to men tion EngUsh ways as the pattern we should foUow, and here again we should not shrink from going to school to England. Every great nation feels the natural needs of regarding every happening in the world from its own point of view and as of national importance. This is the EngUsh way, and we must repeat that it is an error to apply to it the term "arrogance," for fundamentally it is grand, and we should emulate it. Why is it that EngUsh private enterprises abroad, whether they are commercial, reUgious, or of any other nature, assume so quickly proportions of a national poUtical impor tance? and why do they also signify the strengthening of the EngUsh idea in the world? Why does every Eng Ushman feel himself to be the bearer of the EngUsh idea wherever fate or his fancies have taken him? Because the EngUsh mind cannot help looking upon the national idea as a personal possession at home and abroad, and conversely of regarding one's own wishes and interests as paramount with those of the whole nation. Without this quaUty of the EngUsh character the present grandeur of England would be unthinkable. If we compare with this the German mode of thought we notice that it regards everything foreign, strange, 206 GERMAN WORLD POLICIES and distant with a certain amount of admiration, and often with undue respect, but that the conviction that the German point of view and German interests should be enforced, is generaUy lacking. It also is a German habit, one almost might say a necessity, to leave foreign pohtics entirely in the hands of professional poUticians, and to consider oneself an ignorant minor in the fact of their mysteries. The old phrase "sUence is the first duty of a citizen" has long lost its meaning in our home poUtics, while in foreign affairs it has almost come to be the rule for the behavior not only of the masses, but also of the inteUigent people. If England's conduct under King Edward had not shaken us out of our leth argy, there would probably be no interest at aU in Ger many in our foreign poUcy. This is a mistake, if for no other reason, because in ternational poUtics today are simple and transparent affairs compared with the obscure workings -of earUer days,-when they were determined by the personal wishes of dynasties. Today they correspond to the vital neces sities of the people. Formerly the nations were the pawns of princes, today the nations themselves are the actors on the stage of the world. In this respect there is no great difference between those people who still have an autocratic form of government, and those who have advanced on the road to democracy. In either case the government needs must act in foreign OUR FOREIGN POLICY 207 affairs in the interest of the whole nation, for no poUtical action directed toward foreign lands can succeed when the people have not felt it pecuUarly their own. This fact unfortunately has but sUghtly entered into our pubUc conscience, as is proved by the remarkable ignorance and lack of a feeling of responsibility in our discussions of foreign affairs. Our representatives in parUament, our editors and lecturers, know few weU founded and reUable facts; and even our diplomats often show in spite of their professional training, that they belong to a nation which has no conception of the full grandeur and the necessity of our transoceanic needs. Our representatives in foreign lands bear an im mediate relation to the quality of our poUcy, whUe the natural expansion of the German idea in the world de pends most especially on the abiUty of our diplomats to judge correctly the conditions which exist among foreign nations. This wUl of course determine at least in part the dominating policy in the home office. Here again we meet a natural result of our home habits and one which is bound to endanger the progress of the German idea, we mean the almost exclusive preference of a special class in the making of appointments to the diplomatic corps. One glance at the diplomatic manual and the calen dar of Gotha suffices to reveal how overwhelming a part is played in the diplomatic service by the nobihty. 208 GERMAN WORLD POLICIES In the age of court poUtics it may have been correct to call to these offices representatives of the class most famUiar with court etiquette. Today, however, this is desirable in only a few exceptional cases, while it is far more necessary that our diplomats should have an ex tensive knowledge along historical, poUtical and eco nomic lines, and the abiUty and the inclination to pursue methodical studies in these subjects. They also should know how to meet men of different extraction, who frequently are very democratic in their antecedents and their points of view. According to the old principle the ambassador is the personal representative of one monarch at the court of another. Today this view is untenable, for there is hardly a modern foreign poUcy which is not that of the common interests of nations. In this respect even the oldest and largest monarchies have been rapidly democratized. Only, the growth of the complexity of the modern political, economic, and social conditions has been more rapid. The opinion that the selection of men for the observation of these gigantic processes among nations, could without harm overlook a large number of exceptionally well-fitted personaUties in preference of a special class which no longer possesses exclusive qualifications for this service, is one of the errors which must be most harmful for the progress of the German idea. This is, nevertheless, our official prac tice, which thereby calls for the most severe criticism. OUR FOREIGN POLICY 209 It is impossible that this procedure of fiUing a num ber of positions under the foreign office should not be accompanied by unsatisfactory results. There are, moreover, too few under secretaries and assistants in the office itself. In the foreign office in London and in aU English positions of simUar importance there are persons whose knowledge of foreign lands is based on their own personal observation, whatever part of the world may come in question. With us it is necessary, owing to insufficient means to burden our officials with reports on countries which they do not know personaUy. This is a way of doing things which would be ridiculous, if it did not deserve a far more serious condemnation. But if we wish to have in Berlin authorities on at least the important foreign countries, we must depart from our antiquated system of selecting men for our em bassies from a special class, and in addition appoint a much larger number of men than are at work at present. The general ignorance which exists in Germany on aU foreign matters reacts unfavorably on our official poUcy, for there is not the controlling and at the same time authoritative and encouraging participation in all matters which the EngUsh educated classes bring to bear on the actions of their government. Not only our people but also our diplomats seem to think that the workings of foreign poUtics must take place in a dark room. Certain matters must, of course, be pre- 2IO GERMAN WORLD POLICIES pared with the pubUc excluded, but the best and the strongest pohcy both at home and abroad is after all that of frank sincerity. Another result of our inex perience is that our pubhc opinion is apt to espouse the wrong side of a question, if its interest is ac tuaUy aroused. We saw this recently in the Morocco affair. Aside from the fact that a further cleavage of our African possessions by the acquisition of a part of North Africa would have been a mistake, and that Morocco presents an undesirable project for us because of its Mohammedan difficulties, the demands of our patriots to make a test case just at that time and in that place against England and France was wrong not only from a practical point of view but also on principle. As long as the Bagdad railway has not yet reached AleppQ, we cannot count on the Turkish co-operation against Egypt, and as long as ,the fortifications of the canal ttmnecting the Baltic with the North Sea, and of Helgoland and other important stations are unfinished, we cannot await a possible attack by the EngUsh fleet with the same equanimity as wiU be possible after they have been completed. Assuming that there reaUy had been a weighty cause for a war, we at any rate should not have brought matters to a crisis while several fac tors which might determine the course of events in our favor were as yet non-existing. But not even this consideration should have been our foreign Policy 211 given an important place in the conduct of the Morocco affair, because the determining factor must always be pur conviction that we must not have war, unless Ger many's great and immediate necessities of existence are actually in danger. But these were never jeopardized in the discussion whether we should demand a part of West Morocco as our sphere of interest. If in the future they ever wiU be jeopardized, both we and our oppo nents wiU have much bigger things at stake than a bit of Atlantic Coast Une in the shadow of Mount Atlas. It may be true that in the past, and perhaps a not very remote past, our foreign pohcy deserved the re proach of weakness and a certain noticeable lack of results. To make the same reproach now is, however, only possible, if one looks at matters from a wrong angle or is prejudiced. A few necessary things, nevertheless, are stUl lacking in the conduct of our foreign affairs: The government is not sufficiently energetic and pur poseful in its reorganization of our diplomatic forces, and the people as a whole are lacking in an ^intelligent interest in the happenings and conditions of the world at large. AU of us must be more thoroughly imbued with the wish to obey the dictates of the national idea, ere a real popular understanding of world questions can make our official pohcy more effective than it is today. CHAPTER VII MORAL CONQUESTS The foreign poUcy of a nation takes account of all efforts to further its national idea in the world. <4t has to do not only with miUtary and economic, but also with moral conquests, for without the latter lasting success is impossible. The existing conditions in Prussian Poland, in North- Schleswig and in Alsace-Lorraine prove that we are quite capable of making failures in this respect. Nor need we disguise the fact from ourselves that also in other parts of the world we are less liked, than, for in stance, the EngUsh or the French. People wiU say, how can this be possible, since both England and France have often been guilty of violence and insolence in their deaUngs with weaker nations? This is true, but the more important fact is also true that powerful cultural influences have emanated from either country, and have been gratefuUy felt in the whole world. Many people therefore, possess a vivid picture of what the EngUsh and the French people have done for the culture of the world, whUe few have any similar feelings toward Ger- MORAL CONQUESTS 215 many. Individual citizens of foreign states who have made our acquaintance or whose education enables them to appreciate even without such an acquaintance the German contributions to the general culture of the world, wiU no doubt do justice to our achievements, but nations as such are Uttle acquainted with each other, and are hardly able to judge one another objectively and fairly. It is, therefore, not at aU astonishing that the younger peoples of the Western hemisphere, whose states have recently been formed, and the older states of Asia who are gradually leaving their seclusion of thousands of years should know Uttle more of us than our most recent" accomphshments since the foundations of the German empire. Our former achievements, such as the Uberation of the human mind in the age of the Reformation, the part we played in the Uterature of the world from the middle of the 18th century to the early 19th century, and the foundation of the philosophy .of ideas, these are all matters which people of merely moderate cultivation cannot understand, if for no other reason than that they know nothing of them. What people do know is this: Forty years ago the Germans suddenly rose from an existence which was insignificant both economically and pohticaUy to one of great strength. They have fought for and won the rank of a world power, they have created a mighty army, and have tremen dously increased their commerce and their industries; 214 GERMAN WORLD POLICIES they have buUt ships, and have now begun to demand consideration for their interests in the world at large. If we are unprejudiced and know something of the workings of the minds of people, we must confess that such things may create fear or respect, and perhaps even a certain amount of surprise and admiration, but that they are not calculated to achieve moral conquests. We are Uving in an age when the tendencies of aU nations seem to be toward democracy and freedom. It is not only the transatlantic states which are democracies, without a single exception, for even the Asiatic monster empires are falling under the influence of the principle of self-government. Often the new conditions are un stable and the innovations of doubtful duration, but the word "national freedom" has been heard within the imperial palace of Peking, in the cities of Iran, and the Hagia Sophia in Constantinople— and the rulers have bowed to it! In the name of fatherland and free dom — however confused the notions of these terms may be — the tyranny of Abd ul Hamid has been overthrown, the Shah Muhammed AU has been expelled from Persia, and the old dynasty of the Manchu has been swept away by the wave of modern republicanism in China. Germany, in the judgment of most people, is a mighty power but one opposed to freedom. ' It matters little whether this judgment of the world is wrong or right — in its generalization and exaggeration it is surely wrong MORAL CONQUESTS 215 — but we must reahze that this view is universaUy held and that we ourselves supply in our dealings with other nations some of the arguments on which it is based. We are mistaken, if we beUeve that the few remaining reac- , tionary traits in our home pohtics are of no consequence for our general position in the world. Let us remember how genially Bismarck, by birth » and character the representative of the principle of authority, adopted universal suffrage as the greatest 'of the "liberal arts" in Our home politics in order to make the position of Germany as impressive and power ful as possible in the eyes of the outside world. He has himself said that his purpose was not only to remove whatever disagreement there might be at home, but also to avoid the very appearance of it both at home and abroad. If we remember this principle of which our greatest statesman made such excellent use at' a critical time, and adapt it logically to present condi tions, we must reaUze how seriously our national rela tions with the outside world are affected, not only by the actual dominion of reactionary poUtical ideas in Germany, but also by the mere appearance of such a dominion.- Everything that can possibly be said about our poUtical Ufe as being reactionary is eagerly repeated by our opponents and competitors in their endeavor to discredit us. The assumption that this method of creating feeling against Germany did not interfere with 2l6 GERMAN WORLD POLICIES the progress of our national idea in the world is very erroneous. It is only necessary to become acquainted with the foreign press which is thus inspired in an anti- German way — and it does not matter whether the papers are written in EngUsh, French, Turkish, Arabic, or Chinese — to appreciate the powerful influence which through them is exerted against us. There are very few Oriental, East Asiatic or American statesman who have personal knowledge and acquaintance with German affairs. ^ Almost everyone abroad forms his opinions from the daily press or the magazines, and the leading officials themselves and other influential people are only rarely an exception to this rule. The beUef that we can carry on our political business without a foreign press vigorously instructed and influenced in the in terest of Germany reveals our innocence in matters of foreign poUcy. In this respect the EngUsh, the French, the Americans, and even such youthful states as Japan are ahead of us not only in knowledge but also in prac- ' tice. A hostile press can do us more harm abroad than the most thorough understanding and sympathy even of leading personalities can help us. It is not our intention to advance here, where we are speaking of the necessity of making moral conquests abroad, a program for our home affairs or to take sides with one party or another in the mooted questions of the day, but we cannot deny that our public institu- MORAL CONQUESTS 21 7 tions give occasional evidences of poUtical backward ness even to those who view them in a spirit of mod eration. It makes no real difference whether such conditions exist in Germany or in its leading state Prussia, for foreigners are unable to differentiate between the compUcated subdivisions of our empire. Many if not most objections raised against Germany have either direct reference to Prussia or to customs erroneously imputed to the empire by a process of analogy. The foUowing occurrence may serve as an illustration : When the Manchu dynasty in China decided to yield to the reform party and pubUc opinion, and to introduce a semi-constitutional system of government, a commis sion which had been sent to Europe to study the work ings of the several constitutions, recommended that the new Chinese constitution be modelled after that of Germany. The commissioners did not refer to the im perial constitution but to that of Prussia, and most especiaUy to the Prussian suffrage with its division of the people into three numerically unequal classes which nevertheless cast an equal number of votes. They ba- Ueved that such a system would enable the property- owners and the educated people to keep the govern ment in their own hands. TheoreticaUy many things may be said in favor of such a system for a community like China, actually, however, a reform which was in tended to advance freedom could not have been pro- 2l8 GERMAN WORLD POLICIES claimed more inauspiciously even in China than by basing it on a system which everywhere else in the world was regarded as reactionary. We should know that the absurdities resulting from the appUcation of this system in Prussia, and to which it is not necessary again to caU the attention of the reader, are spread broadcast by the foreign press and are commented upon and exaggerated wherever it is possible to injure us in this way. Nor is it reasonable to expect that our news papers should refrain from criticising conditions which they beUeve to be in dire need of improvement, out of regard for the possible effect of their criticism abroad. If the leading classes in Germany show that they wish to continue conditions which are not conservative in a moderate sense of the word, but reactionary and pohticaUy immoral, it is they and not the press of the opposition who are responsible for the damaged reputa tion and influence of our national idea abroad. Our mistaken behavior in this one point is the more regrettable because it is not reaUy our true national character which hurts us but largely the residue of our former poUtical backwardness. Sooner or later all these things will have to be obviated' with us both in prin ciple and in practice, but this prospect does not prevent them from exerting in the meantime their full pernicious influence. The wish to have the German idea make moral conquests in the world does not determine the MORAL CONQUESTS 21 9 worth of the principle of freedom or of culture, for these enjoy an independent value of their own. Nor do we claim that ideal possessions of whatever kind should be estimated primarily by their political or economic effectiveness. On the contrary we are convinced that only the inner worth of our national idea can influence, and fructify the non-German world and spread the seed of wholesome strength over the general civilization of mankind. The real Germany is not reactionary. She exerts the whole force of her ideal endeavors not for the sake of gaining pohtical ends, but for the sake of the ideas themselves, and her relation to other nations is not solely determined by considerations of opportuneness, for siie possesses the wish and the abihty to see the rights of others. This is true in spite of occasional ex cesses, and more true of the Germans than, for instance, of the EngUsh or the French. The fact, however, re mains that these very nations owe their moral influence in the world to the sense of freedom which characterizes their pohtical culture. Since even Bismarck in his masterful way adopted &t home the principle of freedom for the sake of the respect which it would win for the empire abroad, we might well learn how wise and use ful it would be if we permitted a new spirit to transform our national Ufe today in a way which would strengthen us at home and be unfailingly effective abroad. , 220 GERMAN WORLD POLICIES The two pohtical catchwords "Reaction" and "Gov ernment by feudal classes" which foreign pubhc opinion frequently uses to describe German condition^ are not calculated to bring success to the German idea in the world. But they are not the only obstacles. Like other people we suffer from the defects of our virtues. The reverse and unfortunate complement of that sense of duty and industry which we caUed the positive poles of our character, are an offensive superiority and awk wardness of behavior which are constantly putting us at a disadvantage. Our national aimlessness, more over, often destroys the independence of our people as bearers of German culture and permits their complete assimilation with their new surroundings. This is a pitiful state of affairs, and while it does not exist every where and we must confess that in places our people enjoy a certain respect, it is a fact that they do not know how to warm their relations with other nations to the point where German culture could exert its posi tive influences. The French surpass us in ease of manner and a more estabhshed reputation as a people of uni versal culture; and the EngUsh, who know even less than we how to understand foreign pecufiarities, are ahead of us because of the stronger and more fascinat ing vividness of their national energy X From whatever point of view one looks at the Germans abroad — grant ing of course some splendid exceptions — one is met by MORAL CONQUESTS 221 defects either of inner worth or of abihty to make an active propaganda for the German idea. Need we refer to the embarrassing habits of the German tourists who go through the world in droves with a minimum of toUet and a maximum of noisy talk, or to the lack of national instincts in some of our greatest commercial enterprises which pursue financial gains and neglect then opportunity to work also for the German idea? Between these two observations there is so much Ger man awkwardness, indolence and ignorance of the na tional idea in its highest sense, that we can explain the progress abroad which we have made, only by the one thing in which we excel all other people: our exact and conscientious labor and our remarkable diligence. EarUer in the book we have remarked that the com plete estrangement between us and our nearest rela tives the Swiss and the Dutch is explained by our in- abiUty to make moral conquests, and that the North German character is most to blame. It is incapable of freely understanding the moods of other nations and of hving in friendly harmony with other people. This defect is based on a certain brusqueness of behavior which, starting with Prussia, is graduaUy spreading over the whole of Germany. We call it very erroneously "Schneidigkeit." It has developed from that austere curtness which was natural when Prussia worked her self out of narrow bounds to the head of Germany, 222 GERMAN WORLD POLICIES thanks to her superior miUtary and moral strength. But it has grown more artificial, the more prosperous we have become and the more our unfortunate class distinctions have spread even in the material world. Today it is a mannerism and a sign of national ill be havior. The coolly superior behavior of an EngUshman is based on real strength and a weU poised national character. The German "Schneidigkeit" often is based on nothing but class insolence and indifference to the dictates of the national idea. If it is not actually ridi culed by the intelUgent and educated foreigners, it often does great harm to our poUtical and cultural ef- fectiveness. In discussing our foreign poUtics we caUed attention to the importance of our relations with Turkey, and saw how harmful for our interests in the modern hberal state of Turkey the beUef had been that Germany was a reactionary state. England and France are known as Uberal countries. This mistrust of Germany is, how ever, not the only reason why lhe culture of England or of France are preferred to ours, for the Turks could readily see that certain reactionary tendencies in our home poUtics can do them no harm, while our civihza tion can offer them a quantity of positive values, if they were famiUar with it. But they do not know it, and this is the chief harm. In 1910, Djavid Bey, the then secretary of the treasury and one of the most influen- MORAL CONQUESTS 223 tial men of modern Turkey, said to a newspaper reporter in Paris, where he happened to be, that no country was so close to Turkey moraUy i. e., according to oriental usage culturally, as France. When he said this more than four hundred Young Turks were studying in France, of whom one hundred and fifty were receiving ^scholar ships from the government, and another fifty from the committee of unity and progress. Djavid Bey added: "It is our wish to send even more Young Turks to French schools and colleges, for this cultural permeation has an enormous educational value for us Turks." It was, of course, no accident that the papers which pubhshed this interview contained also accounts of the large in- , vestments made in Turkey by French capital. About two thousand milUon francs have been thus invested, approximately twice as much as Germany has invested there. Three-quarters of aU foreign capital in Turkey is French, and 55% of the Turkish national debt is owned in France. VWhence conies the vital bond which ties Turkey to France and secures to the French their ex- ceptionaUy strong influence aU over the Orient? It is the result of the far-seeing . policy of Napoleon III who spared no expense and no effort to spread in Turkey the French tongue. Napoleon fiUed the high school of Galata-Serai, then the only school after the European model, with French docents, and granted financial support to the cathohc missionary schools, especially 224 GERMAN WORLD POLICIES the "Mission Laique." This society, which unites the entire educational system of the French propaganda, maintains not less than eight hundred schools in the European and the Asiatic provinces of Turkey, and assists French instruction in Turkish schools by money contributions and by furnishing French teachers free of charge. The work of this CathoUc-French propa ganda, which cleverly relegates the reUgious element to the background, wherever it might become embarrass ing, is enormous and its splendid success is in keeping with it. The Young Turkish patriots who started the revolution and created a new country have received, almost aU of them, their higher education in France, for the abundance of free instruction in the French language which is offered to every ambitious Turkish youth had prepared them UnguisticaUy for the higher schools of learning of France. French is the tongue in which the Turk and every educated Oriental converses with a westerner. The newspapers in which he learns of the happenings of the world, are French. The two French journals Stamboul and La Turquie are the most widely read non-Turkish newspapers of Constan tinople. We Westerners who beheve ourselves satiated with culture have no conception of how much Young Turkey is yearning for education. Two years ago Mustafa Beha Bey, the director of education in Constantinople, MORAL CONQUESTS 225 said: " What do the people of the Ottoman Empire need in order to proceed on the road to progress? Nothing but education! Education is the only means to Uberate the human mind. Without it every action is empty, every endeavor childish."' Such words from oriental Ups refer to be sure to a formal education rather than to the finer culture of the soul which tries to under stand the principles of Ufe. With this limitation the oriental yearning for higher learning is perfectly sin cere, but so far as the Turks, and even the Greeks, Armenians, Syrians, etc., are concerned, it is not higher learning itself, but French learning. By the side of the eight hundred (or according to another list six hun dred) French schools only the schools of the EngUsh and American missions are of any consequence, al though they appeal almost exclusively to the native Christians and especially the Armenians, among whom they have been wonderfully successful. - The importance of the German institutions of learn ing in Turkey has been exceedingly small thus far. There are perhaps a dozen, and at their head is the great and excellent "Realschule" of the German and German- Swiss colony in Constantinople. The quaUty of, even the smaUer German schools is good, but owing to their insignificant number, they cannot be credited with a far-reaching influence. The only place where the moral influence of the German idea on Turkey is felt is among 226 GERMAN WORLD POLICIES the officers of the army. Many more ofvthem to be sure can speak French than German, but aU are con- scious at least of^ the fact, that the great technical prog ress of the Turkish, army and much of its moral growth are directly fdu§ ,to' the instruction by German officers. It sounds strange, but it is a fact, that there are some traits of relationship between the Turkish and the German character. The famous saying of Moltke is often quoted, that the Turk is the only Gentleman of the East. It is true that Islam presents to him great obstacles to a ready acquisition of European culture, but these obstacles are not so great as one might think, owing to the mixture of races in what we today caU the Turkish people. The Seldchuks, the Osmans and the other really Turkish Nomads who followed each other in their progress from the East through Armenia into Asia Minor, were hardly more numerous than the Ger man tribes who earUer had taken possession of the Roman provinces. We know from the investigations carried on by Delbriick that it was not millions or even hundreds of thousands, but only thousands or at most tens of thousands of able bodied men and a correspond ing retinue of women and chUdren who made the trip. The fact that Asia Minor has been almost completely Turkenized and Islamized by these smaU numbers is not easily explained, and deserves a special investiga tion which is impossible here. But nobody who knows MORAL CONQUESTS 227 the Turkish inhabitants of Asia Minor and Europe, and has had the opportunity of comparing them with pure or only slightly mixed Turkish tribes, needs' a further proof of the assertion that we have to deal in modern Turkey largely with Arians and Indo-Germans. Formerly this seemed very puzzling, but since we have "learned that not only the later immigrants, such as the Gala- tians and the Phrygians, but also a great part of the original inhabitants of Asia Minor and the Thracians on the European side of the Bosporus and the HeUes- pont, had been Indo-Germanic people, the mystery has disappeared. What has aU this to do with the character of the Turkish Islam? A great deal, since Mohammedanism in Turkey is not nearly so fanatical as in the territories where it is at home. The way in which the modern and better educated Turk approaches Islam is rational and practical. His rehgion offers him a certain general turn of mind, and a simple and commonplace morality which is weU adapted to the needs of his everyday hfe, and more, a valuable discipline and if need be patriotic devotion. The Turk possesses strong miUtary instincts and a soldierly mind, both of which would be impossible without a fund of moral quaUties. If we remember, as we have already said, that fanaticism is not natural to him, we readily comprehend that the new state of the Young Turks enjoys forces of order and statesman- 228 GERMAN WORLD POLICIES / ship which may permit them to maintain themselves in office and thus to preserve their state, provided they proceed to a rigorous reorganization of their army and make use of every possible avaUable resource to ac comphsh this end. It is quite possible that the existing poUtical condi tions wiU be disturbed by inner dissensions or other crises, but no other people but the Turks wiU be last ingly in the ascendency in Asia Minor. If the Enghsh plans should materiaUze, such as the estabhshment of an Egyptian or an Arabic cahphate under British su zerainty, and the direct or indirect incorporation of the Arabian territories belonging to Turkey into the British spheres of influence, a great war would have to foUow, in which the future not only of Turkey but also of Germany would be at stake. - In such a war I think we may hope to be victorious, artd1 ^thereby to estab- Ush on a firmer basis the modenr state of Turkey. ^Tf England renounces her far-reaching plans, the future of Turkey is even more hopeful. Here then is an otipor-. tunity to advance th$ German idea without any regard to political rule or material colonization — provided we comprehend the task in time! The EngUsh do not in frequently try to frighten Turkey and Europe at large with the spectre of a huge German colonization of Mesopotamia or Syria or even Asia Minor, and now and then thoughtless and misinformed Germans have MORAL CONQUESTS 229 spoken favorably of such a possibiUty. Entirely disre garding the fact that for years we have had no emigrants to spare, we could not do anything more foohsh and dangerous to our own interests than to add to the many difficulties which the diversified population of Turkey offers to a strong Turkish government, by introducing there one more heterogeneous element. The experiment of a German colonization, moreover, of Asia Minor would probably be a dismal failure for climatic reasons. If the idea of colonization, therefore, completely drops out from the German-Turkish pohcy, the idea of a poUcy of German-Turkish culture deserves to be pressed with renewed ardor. We must endeavor to make the German language, and German science, and aU the great positive values of our energetic civil ization, duties fulfilled faithfully — active forces for the regeneration of Turkey by transplanting them into Turkey. To do this we need above everything else a^ system of German schools, which need not rival the French in magnitude, but which must be planned on a far larger scale, than" that of the few now existing schools. No lasting and secure cultural influences are possible without the connecting link of the language. The inteUigent and progressive young men of Turkey should have an abundant opportunity to learn German. In the summer of 191 1 about fifty Turkish representa tives, journaUsts, business men and higher officials 230 GERMAN WORLD POLICIES visited Germany on a very successful trip of instruction. Very few of them could speak German, but they carried home with them, in spite of it, a powerful impression of German civilization. One of the leading Turkish journal ists, Achmed Ihsan Bey, pubhsher and owner of several influential journals in Constantinople, declared he had found in Germany much understanding of Osmanic conditions; he had grown to admire the industrial and general progress of Germany, and had told his people of everything that he had seen and believed to be useful for them; he was in fact constantly trying to instruct them in German industry, commerce and poUtics. But is it not ridiculous that this man was obUged to use French in order to praise Germany before his country men! When the visitors returned to Constantinople they were ironicaUy treated by the French press which said that they had become advocates of Germany, and their thoughts were no longer Turkish but German. To this senator IsmaU Muschtak Bey, until then a pronounced advocate of French ways repUed, that he declined to shut his eyes to the fleet in the harbor of Kiel, and the magnificent administration and commerce, the ad vances in science and technique. As a Turk he admired grandeur wherever he met it. "If today some catas trophe should sweep away the entire European culture, and nothing be left but the German way of doing things, MORAL CONQUESTS 23 1 German strength alone would be able to recreate from within itself aU the rest of the lost culture" — in these words another leading personality summed up the im pression which the German trip had made on him and his fellow-travelers. If it were possible to bring to Germany aU the other educated Turks and those yearn ing for education and to give them a first hand view of our achievements, matters would be easy. But since this cannot be done, we can give the Turks an impres sion of our culture and a desire to become familiar with it, only when we teach them our language and thus open the door for them to aU our spiritual possessions. In doing this we are not aiming to Germanize Turkey pohticaUy or economically or to colonize it here or there, but to introduce the German spirit into the great national process of development through which that oriental nation happens to be passing which has a fu ture and which wiU continue to hold political sway over the lands from the Persian gulf to the Mediterranean. This kind of poUcy which can bring it to pass that Turkey and Germany wiU work shoulder to shoulder, mustjse the result of national insight and vohtion. It cannot be officially proclaimed or executed, for it must start with those who are the leaders of our spiritual and material development, that is the representatives of our capital and our intelligence. If these take the ini tiative, as they do with other nations, and begin to 232 GERMAN WORLD POLICIES make German culture actively effective, then our gov ernment wiU have to protect what has been won and assist its growth, just as the atheistic French RepubUc protects even the Cathohc reUgious enterprises of the "Mission Laique" because they foster French culture in the Orient, and because "anticlericaUsm is only for home-consumption." China is the second field which appeals to us most strongly when the pohcy of German culture in the world is discussed. East Asia is the most wonderful instance of the growth of intimate connections between the most remote countries, owing to the development of the com merce of the world in the last few decades. It is, how ever, very significant that untU recently absolutely nothing was known in Germany of the changes which were taking place in China. Apparently the Chinese reformation dates from the end of the Russo-Japanese war in 1904-1905. Japan's victory convinced the Chinese government and the influential part of pubUc opinion that it was no longer possible to resist the modern influences on their national life. ActuaUy, however, the seeds of this reformation were sown when during the "opium war" of 1840 EngUsh cannon opened the country to the commerce of the world. For many dec ades the contract entered into by the Eastern and the Western worlds seemed to have a very shght effect on the civilization of China, and then only in the ports MORAL CONQUESTS 233 where Europeans and Chinese came into business relations with each other. The first things which the Chinamen were willing to take over from us were our armor and engines. They beUeved that they could keep off the "barbarians" if they bought cannon and ships of them and hired a few instructors to teach them their use. Their defeat by Japan in 1894 showed the futiUty of this behef. In the Boxer-Revolution in 1899 old China showed her spirit of revolt for the last time, vainly endeavoring to drive the intruders into the sea by exerting all her pow ers, and caUing to her help the spirits of heaven. She was unable to bring back the age of isolation and satis faction with time-honored customs. Men of deeper insight learned then that it would be impossible com pletely to avoid a closer touch with, and the effects of the western civilization, if the outward strength of the state was to be maintained. They thought a com promise could be made. The natural sciences and mechanics, the arts of war by land and sea, the work of the engineers and the physicians, the whole outer structure of the western states, their administration, customs and finances — all these should be taken over. The home culture, however, it was hoped, could remain based on the principles of Confucius. The idea of a patriarchal, theocratic empire was to be preserved, with piety as the foundation of morality, and strong 234 GERMAN WORLD POLICIES resistance was to be shown to the principle of progress of the western people who look upon struggle as the father of aU things. Even if it had been possible to realize such Utopian dreams which separate the foundations of a culture from its outward manifestations, even then a complete transformation of the government and the social condi tions of China would have had to take place. In reahty the first step taken along new paths irresistibly carried with them powerful consequences. The victory of Japan over Russia strengthened the beUef in the su periority of the West and the necessity of acquiring, Uke Japan, the foundations of its civilization. A ref ormation of the whole machinery of state foUowed quickly; constitution, education, army, finances — every thing was changed. The hoary system of examinations, according to which famiUarity with ancient Uterature offered the only means of admission to official Ufe, dis appeared. Plans were made for a state-wide educational system after European models. The popular attitude to ward the foreign civilization was completely altered. The traditional dislike of foreigners, however, remained in tact, and the reforms were solely intended to secure China against the inroads of foreigners and to nnnimize their influence. But the zeal of replacing the old in stitutions with the new ones grew apace, the more each innovation promised greater national efficiency. MORAL CONQUESTS 235 For the present the motives which have led to the opening of China to the influence of western civUiza tion are of no consequence, and they do not alter the fact that the effect of these reforms wiU have immeasur able consequences not only for China but for the world at large. If anybody should feel inchned to doubt this, let him remember that China has according to a prob ably approximately correct estimate about four hundred miUion inhabitants, i. e., one-quarter of aU mankind. Every fourth man in this world is a Chinaman. The country is, moreover, extravagantly rich in the two most important natural bearers of modern civUization, coal and iron. Nowhere finally is labor so cheap and so abundant as in China. Imagine this numerous and industrious people, civifized to a certain extent since time immemorial and Uving in a huge and wealthy land, suddenly come in possession of our western civUization; imagine them mastering our technique, building rail ways, factories, and mines after European patterns, creating a big home industry and reforming its army and navy. Imagine all this, and it is not difficult to see what incisive changes in the whole world may result from the future culture and form of government of China. It is a naive beUef of Europe that China could be lastingly influenced by our western civUization even if no settlement with Confucianism took place. The 236 GERMAN WORLD POLICIES speedy infection of the Manchu government with a super ficial and materiaUstic modernism, imported from Japan and even more from America, should not make us be lieve that the .battle is won. ^The old Chinese spirit is not xlead. Half a century ago it conquered the Taiping revolution in one big fight, and today when the dis turbances have outwardly ceased, it wiU again exert itseff, and try to reconstruct China wholly from within. But if it wishes to succeed, it must become more thor oughly famUiar with the foundations of our European civilization than it has been heretofore. Which nation of Europe or America, and this is the important ques- tion, wiU take the leading part in shaping the culture of China by offering a synthesis of the elements of Con fucianism with those of our western civilization? If we disregard the Japanese who for some time have planned in their own way, to make China poUtically and culturally dependent on them, it is the EngUsh and the Americans who have with instinctive energy most earnestly striven to win for the Anglo-Saxon idea a prominent place in China. The importance of this has been understood in official and in private circles in England as well as in America. For years both coun tries have pursued an ardent national, commercial, and economic poUcy in China-. ^Their greatest factor of in fluence, however^ has been an- active mission. The EngUsh-American missionary -societies are at present MORAL CONQUESTS 237 the most important because of the Anglo-Saxon "prop aganda in China. Their income is enormous. American kings of industry are donating to them miUions of dol lars for the creation of a well organized system of schools permeated with the spirit of Anglo-Saxon culture: -, An EngUsh-American-Chinese university with an endow ment of several million marks is being built in the "Hin terland" of Kiautchou and Tsingtau in the very sphere of the German interests. All these institutions are to be open to aU young Chinamen who wish to learn the western sciences. Our own navy department has created in Tsingtau itself a German-Chinese high school, where Chinese young men are instructed in the German sciences and in German culture — but the money which has been secured for this purpose in Germany does not amount to much compared with the generous support which Eng land and America give to their schools. Toward the end of 191 1 the London Times, foUowed by other papers in England, Canada, and the United States, pubhshed an appeal for subscriptions to an Anglo- Saxon university in China. The name of the Duke of Connaught, a brother of the late King Edward VII headed the list, followed by those of Chinese ministers, EngUsh noblemen and diplomats, and more than thirty professors of the universities of Oxford, Cambridge, and London, and representatives of American and Canadian universities, of EngUsh banks "with branches at home ) 238 . GERMAN WORLD POLICIES and in rChina, and a long Ust of important pubUc men. The signers asked for 250,000 pounds sterling up to Easter 1912" of which 125,000 pounds was to be the share of England while the rest was to be equally di vided between the United States and Canada. It was thus the intention of raising not less than five miUion marksT-within the short space of four months, for an undertaking designed to advance in China the influence of Anglo-Saxon culture. The appeal in the Times enumerated the economic advantages of such an uni versity for the commercial interests of England. "If Education advances in China," this was the argument, "and if the mode of Uving there is improved, the country wiU be better able to absorb an increased import of British goods. A poor and ignorant country is a poor purchaser. As soon as the new university has given statesmen, jurists, teachers, engineers, physicians, and commercial leaders to the country both the exports and the imports will grow. The students of the uni versity will be the future leaders of China!" Then the religious and humane reasons for the enter prise were mentioned. The students would come under the influence of Christian professors, teachers, and su pervisors, and a great economy of charity would follow, for inundations, famine, diseases, and many other iUs of which China is suffering are direct consequences of ignorance and of a lack of engineers. It is better to MORAL CONQUESTS 239 educate a people to help themselves than to make great contributions to them whenever help is needed. The western world, moreover, has responsibiUties, and should see to it that China is improved. It has been said that commerce follows the flag. In China one can say with greater justification, that commerce has fol lowed the language of commerce. China must be able to produce in order to be able to buy. England arid America, therefore, must attend to it that ignorance and poverty, these two enemies of progress, are con quered with Anglo-Saxon assistance, and that the present position of the English language in the Far East as that of education and of commerce is not only maintained, but also extended. These were the arguments of the appeal in the Times. Next to the university in Hankau another equally grand EngUsh enterprise is nearing completion in Hong kong. The five million marks which this school also is to cost have been practically subscribed by English and English-friendly Chinese private individuals. The Americans themselves made use of a truly magnificent means to strengthen their influence in China years ago when they remitted the entire Boxer indemnity, and even repaid the instalments which had already been made — under the condition that China should send annuaUy, for ten years, eighty young men to America to study. Coupled with aU these means and plans there 240 GERMAN WORLD POLICIES is the effective activity of the EngUsh and American missions, and especiaUy the mission schools. Dr. Sun Jat Sen himself, the first man elected to the presidency of the Chinese repubUc, had been a pupU in an American mission school, for he was educated in the medical col lege of the American hospital in Canton. , It is even credibly stated that he is a baptized Christian. The German interests demand, in view of all this, that also our missions and our schools should enter on an era of active development. They should receive our national support for by the side of their excellent re Ugious work they can well foster the general influence of German culture. Even if there are traits in the Ger man missions which may caU for criticism, it is high time that the educated German phiUstines disabuse themselves of the notion that foreign missions deserve no special interest. The Enghsh, American, and French missions in China, in the Orient, and in Africa show their importance for the spread of national culture so impressively that more than ignorance is needed to be deaf to this lesson. No thoughtful Anglo-Saxon, even if he is personally not religious, will deny for a moment the intimate relation between a foreign mission and the spread of a national idea. He will, therefore, not withdraw himself from the active support of the mis sions maintained by his country in foreign lands. The author has made the acquaintance in China of MORAL CONQUESTS 241 one of our German missions which is singularly weU qualified to make the liberal, and at the same time na tional, evangelical, and humane character of our civiliza tion effective in China at the present time: the General Association of Evangelical Protestant Missions ["AUge- meiner EvangeUsch-Protestantischer Missionsverein "] or as it is caUed in the East, the Weimar-Mission.1 He feels the need, therefore, of recommending it to the support of aU Germans and aU Uberal evangeUcal readers of this book. The experiences in China are a powerful example of the rapidity and suddenness with which the home con ditions of a country may develop into a crisis, when they have been long subjected to influences of change, however slow-working these may have seemed to be, and how such a crisis may become a catastrophe when external and unexpected conditions have set the ball rolling at the decisive moment. It is not necessary to describe the consequences for the cultural, economic, and pohtical character of the future generations, if the four hundred miUion world of China were to accept for aU times a culture which is largely if not exclusively Anglo-Saxon. We do not deny that the Enghsh and the Americans have been for a long while in close touch with the problems of China, while we who have lacked 1 Contributions may be sent to the treasurer, Mr. Max Thieme, Berlin-Charlottenburg, Friedbergstrasse 15. 242 GERMAN WORLD POLICIES their clear insight have lagged behind and that it is, therefore, asking much of our power of pohtical imagination to demand that we should suddenly rouse ourselves and determine that the German idea shaU have its share in the transformation through which a fuU quarter of humanity is now beginning to pass. Unless our educated classes, however, comprehend the responsibihty which Ues upon them, and assume the leadership in this cause, our masses cannot be ex-, pected to see the needs of the German idea in the far East, in Turkey, or anywhere else. PhiUstinism~ class distinctions, and severity masked as-"Schneidigkeit," are after aU — we hope — less charac teristic of Germany as she is than as she seems to be. If we look closely, traits of a new, specifically Gernym culture appear, which wUl not only be able to interpret the values of the German character to the> people of Asia and of Africa, -but wiU also give a brighter hght to the meaning of the German idea in the cultivated Western world. If this beUef is right, the surest proof wiU be that the Germans begin to work, for their national fu ture in the world whUe it is day! The caU, therefore, is going out to the educated men of Germany: Rouse yourselves and work for the German idea in the world ! What our educated people recognize as right, and set out to do must before long come to be the wish of aU MORAL CONQUESTS 243 the people; and when it has once been translated into pubUc opinion nature herself decrees that it must be a part of the nation's poUcy and a mainspring of its ac tivities! IMPORTANT BOOKS ON THE GREAT WAR Tho \X/«-«-l/-l \Y/ov • How It Looks to the Nations Involved and 1 11c w oria w ar . What It Means to Us , By ELBERT FRANCIS BALDWIN Decorated cloth, i2tno. $1.25 net; postage extra The present war in Europe has called forth a great many books bear ing on its different phases, but in the majority of instances these have been written from the standpoint of some one of the nations. Elbert Francis Baldwin has here, however, brought together within the com pass of a single volume a survey of the entire field. Mr. Baldwin was in Europe at the outbreak of hostilities. He mingled with the people, observing their spirit and temper more intimately than it has been permitted most writers to do, and in consequence the de scriptions which he gives of the German, or French, or English, or Rus sian attitude are truer and more complete than those found in previous studies of the war. Mr. Baldwin's statements are calm and just in conclusion. When discussing the German side he has included all of the factors which the Germans think important, and assimilated wholly the German feeling, as he has done in his considerations of the other countries. "The one indispensable volume so far published for those who desire a comprehensive survey of the situation. . . . One of the most valuable contributions to the literature of the World War." — Portland Express. "The dramatic story ... is unusually calm and dispassionate, after the modern historical manner, with a great deal of fresh information." — Phila. North-American. "Sets down without bias the real causes of the Great War." — N. Y. Times. Russia and the World By STEPHEN GRAHAM Illustrated. Cloth, 8110. Stephen Graham is always entertaining, a fact to the truth of which the many readers of his previous volumes will testify. In addition to his pleasing style he has, in the present book, a subject of commanding interest and one on which he is well qualified to write. He has been for years a peculiarly sympathetic student of Russia. He has tramped through the country and knows its problems more intimately probably than any other English or American author. This record of his observa tions and conclusions makes fascinating reading. 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