Part 19 (2/2)

An insight into Germany's financial situation was given by the report of Finance Minister Schiffer, who disclosed that the prodigious sum of nineteen billion marks would be required in the coming year to pay interest charges alone. The war, he declared, had cost Germany one hundred and sixty-one billion marks, which exceeded by nearly fourteen billions the credits that had been granted.

The incubus of the terrible armistice terms rested upon the a.s.sembly.

Enemy newspapers, especially those of Paris, were daily publis.h.i.+ng estimates of indemnities to be demanded from Germany, and the most modest of these far exceeded Germany's total wealth of all descriptions.

Nave German editors faithfully republished these articles, failing to realize that they were part of the enemy propaganda and designed further to weaken the Germans' morale and increase their feeling of helplessness and despondency. Not even the fiercest German patriots and loyalists of the old school could entirely shake off the feeling of helplessness that overshadowed and influenced every act of the National a.s.sembly.

The Majority Socialists had come to realize more fully the difference between theory and practice. The official organ of the German Federation of Labor had discovered a week earlier that ”the socialistic conquests of the revolution can be maintained only if countries competing with German industry adopt similar inst.i.tutions.” There were already concrete proofs available that socialization, even without regard to foreign compet.i.tion, was not practical under the conditions prevailing in the country. At least two large factory owners in Northern Germany had handed their plants over to their workmen and asked them to take full charge of manufacture and sale. In both instances the workmen had, after a trial, requested the owners to resume charge of the factories.

How shall we socialize when there is nothing to socialize? asked thoughtful men. The answer was obvious. _Gegen den Tod ist kein Kraut gewachsen_ (there is no remedy against death) says an old German proverb, and industry was practically dead. The government party now discovered what Marx and Engels had discovered nearly fifty years before.

”The practical application of these principles will always and everywhere depend upon historically existing conditions. * * * The Commune has supplied the proof that the laboring cla.s.s cannot simply take possession of the machinery of state and set it in motion for its own purposes.”[63]

[63] Introduction to the second edition of the Manifesto of 1849, quoted in chapter iii.

The tardy realization of this fact placed the delegates of the government party in a serious dilemma. Sweeping socialization had been promised, and the rank and file of the party expected and demanded it.

In these circ.u.mstances it was obvious that a failure to carry out what was at the same time a party doctrine and a campaign pledge would have serious consequences, and it must be reckoned to the credit of the leaders of the party that they put the material welfare of the state above party considerations and refused to let themselves be hurried into disastrous experiments along untried lines. Their att.i.tude resulted in driving many of the members of the Socialist party into the ranks of the Independents, but in view of the fact that the government nevertheless remained strong enough to defeat these elements wherever they had recourse to violence, and of the further fact that to accede to the demands of these intransigeants would have given the final blow to what little remained of German industry, the leaders must be said to have acted wisely and patriotically.

With organization effected, the National a.s.sembly settled down to work.

But it was work as all similar German organizations in history had always understood it. All the political immaturity, the tendency to philosophical and abstract reasoning, the ineradicable devotion to the merely academic and the disregard of practical questions that are such prominent characteristics of the people were exhibited just as they had been at the Congress at Frankfort-on-the-Main seventy years earlier. It has been written of that Congress:

”But the Germans had had no experience of free political life.

Nearly every deputy had his own theory of the course which ought to be pursued, and felt sure that the country would go to ruin if it were not adopted. Learned professors and talkative journalists insisted on delivering interminable speeches and on examining in the light of ultimate philosophical principles every proposal laid before the a.s.sembly. Thus precious time was lost, violent antagonisms were called forth, the patience of the nation was exhausted, and the reactionary forces were able to gather strength for once more a.s.serting themselves.”[64]

[64] _Encyclopedia Britannica_, t.i.tle ”Germany.”

Except that the reactionary forces were too weakly represented at Weimar to make them an actual source of danger this characterization of the Frankfort Congress might have been written about the proceedings of the National a.s.sembly of February. It is a significant and illuminating fact that the greatest animation exhibited at any time during the first week of the a.s.sembly was aroused by a difference of meaning as to the definition of a word. Professor Hugo Preuss, Prussian Minister of the Interior, to whom had been entrusted the task of drafting a proposed const.i.tution for the new republic, referred in a speech elucidating it, to ”an absolute majority.”

”Does 'absolute majority' mean a majority of the whole number of delegates?” asked some learned delegate.

The other delegates were galvanized instantly into the tensest interest.

Here was a question worth while! What does ”absolute majority” mean? An animated debate followed and was listened to with a breathless interest which the most weighty financial or economic questions had never succeeded in evoking.

And while the National a.s.sembly droned thus wearily on, clouds were again gathering over Berlin and other cities in the troubled young republic.

CHAPTER XVII.

The Spartacans Rise Again.

Article xxvi of the armistice of November 11th declared:

”The Allies and the United States have in view the provisioning of Germany during the armistice to the extent deemed necessary.”[65]

[65] Les Allies et les etats-Unis envisagent le ravitaillement de l'Allemagne, pendant l'armistice, dans la mesure reconnue necessaire.

Even by the end of November it had become apparent to all intelligent observers on the ground and to many outside Germany that such provisioning was urgently necessary, and that if it did not come at once the result would be a spread of Bolshevism which would endanger all Europe. Allied journalists in Germany were almost a unit in recognizing the dangers and demands of the situation, but they were greatly hampered in their efforts to picture the situation truthfully by the sentiments prevailing in their respective countries as a result of the pa.s.sions engendered by the conflict so lately ended. This was in the highest degree true as to the Americans, which was especially regrettable and unfortunate in view of the fact that America was the only power possessing a surplus of immediately available foodstuffs. American correspondents, venturing to report actual conditions in Germany, found themselves denounced as ”pro-Germans” and traitors by the readers of their papers. More than this: they became the objects of unfavorable reports by officers of the American Military Intelligence, although many of these men themselves were convinced that empty stomachs were breeding Bolshevism with every pa.s.sing day. One correspondent, who had been so bitterly anti-German from the very beginning of the war that he had had to leave Germany long before America entered the struggle, was denounced in a report to the Military Intelligence at Was.h.i.+ngton on March 3d as ”having shown pro-German leanings throughout the war.” An American correspondent with a long and honorable record, who had taken a prominent part in carrying on American propaganda abroad and upon whose reports high diplomatic officials of three of the Allied countries had relied, was astounded to learn that the Military Intelligence, in a report of January 11, 1919, had denounced him as ”having gone to Berlin to create sentiment in the United States favorable to furnis.h.i.+ng Germany food-supply.”

There was less of this sort of thing in England, and many prominent Englishmen were early awake to the dangers that lay in starvation. Early in January Lord Henry Bentinck, writing to the London _Daily News_, declared there was no sense in maintaining the blockade. It was hindering the development of industry and the employment of the idle in England, and in Middle Europe it was killing children and keeping millions hungry and unemployed. The blockade, said Lord Henry, was the Bolshevists' best friend and had no purpose except to enable England to cut off her own nose in order to spite Germany's face. Many other leaders of thought in England took the same stand.

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