Part 2 (2/2)
You have only to take the heart out of those who would willingly labor and save, by taxing them ad misericordiam for the most laudable philanthropic objects. For it makes not the smallest difference to the motives of the thrifty and industrious part of mankind whether their fiscal oppressor be an Eastern despot, or a feudal baron, or a democratic legislature, and whether they are taxed for the benefit of a corporation called Society or for the advantage of an individual styled King or Lord,” writes Sir Henry Maine. In short it matters not in the least what you baptize oppression, so long as it is oppression, or whether you call your tyrant ”Jim” or ”My Lord,” so long as he is a tyrant. Many people are slowly awakening to the fact in England and in America, that plain citizen ”Jim” can be a most merciless tyrant in spite of his unpretentious name and t.i.tle. No royal tyrant ever dared to attempt to gain his ends by dynamiting innocent people, as did the trades-unionists at Los Angeles, or to starve a whole population as did the trades-unionists in London. We have not escaped tyranny by changing its name. The idea of the Contrat Social and of all its dilutions since, has been that individuals go to make up society, and that society under the name of the state must take charge of those individuals. The French Revolution was a failure because it fell back upon that tiresome and futile philosophy of government which had been that of Louis XIV. Louis XIV took care of the individual units of the state by exploiting them. He was a sound enough Socialist in theory.
France gained nothing of much value along the lines of political philosophy.
Whether it is Louis XIV who says ”l'etat c'est moi” or the citizens banded together in a state, who claim that the functions of the state are to meddle with the business of every man, matters little. It is the same socialistic philosophy at bottom, and it has produced to-day a France of thirty-eight millions of people pledged to sterility, one million of whom are state officials superintending the affairs of the others at a cost, in salaries alone, of upward of five hundred million dollars a year.
In no political or philosophical sense was the French Revolution a revolution at all. It was a change of administration and leaders, but not a change of political theory. The French Revolution put the state in impartial supremacy over all cla.s.ses by destroying exemptions claimed by the n.o.bility and the clergy, and thus extended the power of the state. The English Revolution without bloodshed reduced the power of the state, not for the advantage of any cla.s.s, but for individual liberty and local self-government. We Americans are the political heirs of the latter, not of the former, revolution.
Germany was stirred slightly to hope for freedom, but stirred mightily to protest against anarchy later. These were the two influences from the French Revolution that affected Germany, and they were so contradictory that Germany herself was for nearly a hundred years in a mixed mood. One influence enlivened the theoretical democrat, and the other sent the armies of all Europe post-haste to save what was left of orderly government in France.
But Prussia was not what she had been under Frederick the Great.
Frederick was more Louis XIV than Louis XIV himself. The economic and political errors of the French Revolution found their best practical exponent in Frederick the Great. In the introduction to his code of laws we have already mentioned are the words: ”The head of the state, to whom is intrusted the duty of securing public welfare, which is the whole aim of society, is authorized to direct and control all the actions of individuals toward this end.” Further on the same code reads: ”It is inc.u.mbent upon the state to see to the feeding, employment, and payment of all those who cannot support themselves, and who have no claim to the help of the lord of the manor, or to the help of the commune: it is necessary to provide such persons with work which is suitable to their strength and their capacity.”
When Frederick died he left Prussia in the grip of this enervating pontifical socialism, which always everywhere ends by palsying the individual, and through the individual the state, with the blight of demagogical and theoretical legislation. The fine army grew pallid and without spirit, the citizens lost their individual pride, the nation as a whole lost its vigor, and when Napoleon marched into Berlin, he remarked that the country hardly seemed worth conquering.
The century from the death of Frederick the Great, in 1786, to the death of William the First, in 1888, includes, in a convenient period to remember: the downfall of Frederick's patriotic edifice; the apathy and impotency that followed upon the breaking up of the bureaucracy he had welded into efficiency; the shuffling of the German states by Napoleon as though they were the pack of cards in a great political game; a revival of patriotism in Prussia after floggings and insults that were past bearing; the jealousies and enmities of the various states, the betrayal of one by the other, and finally the struggle between Austria and Prussia to decide upon a leader for all Germany; and at last the war against France, 1870-71, which was to make it clear to the world that Germany had been Prussianized into an empire.
Frederick William II, the nephew of Frederick the Great, who succeeded him, was King of Prussia from 1786 to 1797. Frederick William III, his son, and the husband of the beautiful and patriotic Queen Louisa, was King of Prussia from 1797 to 1840. Frederick William IV, a loquacious, indiscreet, loose-lipped sovereign, of moist intellect and mythical delusions, was King of Prussia from 1840 to 1857, when his mental condition made his retirement necessary, and he was succeeded by his brother, Frederick William Ludwig, first as regent, then as king in 1861, known to us as that admirable King and Emperor, William I, who died in 1888.
Perhaps the most remarkable characteristic of these sovereigns, to those of us who look upon Germany to-day as autocratically governed in fact and by tradition, is their willing surrender to the people, on every occasion when the demand has been, even as little insistent as the German demand has been. In the case of Frederick William IV, his claim, at least in words, upon his divine rights as a sovereign was the mark of a wavering confidence in himself. He was not satisfied with a rational sanction for his authority, but was forever a.s.suring his subjects that G.o.d had p.r.o.nounced for him; much as men of low intelligence attempt to add vigor to their statements by an oath. ”I hold my crown,” he said, ”by the favor of G.o.d, and I am responsible to Him for every hour of my government.” Much under the influence of the two scholars Niebuhr and Ranke, he hated the ideas of the French Revolution, and dreamed of an ideal Christian state like that of the Middle Ages. He was caricatured by the journals of the day, and laughed at by the wits, including Heine, and pictured as a king with ”Order” on one hand, ”Counter-order” on the other, and ”Disorder” on his forehead.
Though Frederick William II marched into France in 1792, to support the French monarchy, neither his army nor his people were prepared or fit for this enterprise, and he soon retired. In 1793, Prussia joined Russia in a second part.i.tion of Poland, but in 1795, angry with what was considered the double dealing of Austria and Russia, Prussia concluded a peace with France, the treaty of Basle was signed in 1795, and for ten years Prussia practically took no part in the Napoleonic wars.
Napoleon took over the lands on the left bank of the Rhine, took away the freedom of forty-eight towns, leaving only Hamburg, Bremen, Frankfort, Augsburg, and Nuremberg, and in 1803 he took Hanover.
Later, in 1805, Bavaria, Wurtemberg, and Baden aided Napoleon to fight the alliance against him of Austria, England, Russia, and Sweden. In that same year the Electors of Wurtemberg and Bavaria were made kings by Napoleon. In 1806 Bavaria, Baden, Wurtemberg, and Hessen seceded from the German Empire, formed themselves into the Confederation of the Rhine, and acknowledged Napoleon as their protector. In 1806 Francis II, Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire, resigned, and there was neither an empire nor an emperor of Germany, nor was there a Germany of united interests.
In 1806 Frederick William III, driven by the grossest insults to his country and to his wife, finally declared war against France; there followed the battle of Jena, in which the Germans were routed, and in that same year Napoleon marched into Berlin unopposed. In 1807 the Russian Emperor was persuaded to make peace, and Prussia without her ally was helpless. The Peace of Tilsit, in July, 1807, deprived Prussia of the whole of the territory between the Elbe and the Rhine, and this with Brunswick, Hessen-Ca.s.sel, and part of Hanover was dubbed the Kingdom of Westphalia, and Napoleon's youngest brother Jerome was made king. The Polish territory of Prussia was given to the Elector of Saxony, who was also rewarded for having deserted Prussia after the battle of Jena by being made a king. Prussia was further required to reduce her army to forty-two thousand men.
It is neither a pretty nor an inspiriting story, this of the mangling of Germany by Napoleon; of the German princes bribed by kingly crowns from the hands of an ancestorless Corsican; but it all goes to show how far from any sense of common aims and duties, how far from the united Vaterland of to-day, was the Germany of a hundred years ago. It adds, too, immeasurably to the laurels of the man who produced the present German Empire out of his own pocket, and stood as chief sponsor at its christening at Versailles in 1871.
This Prussia that sent twenty thousand troops to aid Napoleon against Russia, and which during the retreat from Moscow went over bodily to the enemy; this Prussia whose vacillating king simpered with delight at a kind word from Napoleon, and s.h.i.+vered with dismay at a harsh one; this army with its officers as haughty as they were incapable, and its men only prevented from wholesale desertion by severe punishment, an army rotten at the core, with a coat of varnish over its worm-eaten fabric; this Prussia humiliated and disgraced after the battle of Jena, in 1806, in seven years' time came into its own again. Vom Stein, Scharnhorst, the son of a Hanoverian peasant, and Hardenberg put new life into the state. At Waterloo the pummelled squares of red-coats were relieved by these Prussians, and Blucher, or ”Old Marschall Vorwarts” as he was called, redeemed his countrymen's years of effeminate la.s.situde and vacillation.
”Such was Vorwarts, such a fighter, Such a lunging, plunging smiter, Always stanch and always straight, Strong as death for love or hate, Always first in foulest weather, Neck or nothing, h.e.l.l for leather, Through or over, sink or swim, Such was Vorwarts?here's to him!”
Napoleon goes to Saint Helena and dies in 1821. What he did for Germany was to prove to her how impossible was a cl.u.s.ter of jealous, malicious provincial little state governments in the heart of Europe, protecting themselves from falling apart by the ancient legislative scaffolding of the Holy Roman Empire. He squeezed three hundred states into thirty-eight, and the very year of Waterloo, on April the 1st, a German Napoleon was born who was to further squeeze these states into what is known to-day as the German Empire.
The Congress of Vienna was a meeting of the European powers to redistribute the possessions, that Napoleon had scattered as bribes and rewards among his friends, relatives, and enemies, so far as possible, among their rightful owners.
From the island of Elba, off the coast of Tuscany, Napoleon looked on while the allies quarrelled at this Congress of Vienna. Prussia claimed the right to annex Saxony; Russia demanded Poland, and against them were leagued England, Austria, and France, France represented by the Mephistophelian Talleyrand, who strove merely to stir the discord into another war. In the midst of their deliberations word came that the wolf was in the fold again. Napoleon was riding to Paris, through hysterical crowds of French men and women, eager for another throw against the world, if their Little Corporal were there to shake the dice for them. He had another throw and lost. The French Revolution in 1789, followed by the insurrection of all Europe against that strange gypsy child of the Revolution, Napoleon, from 1807-1815, ended at last at Waterloo. This lover, who won whole nations as other men win a maid or two; this ruler, who had popes for handmaidens and gave kingdoms as tips, who dictated to kings preferably from the palaces of their own capitals; this fortunate demon of a man, who had escaped even Mlle.
Montausier, was safely disposed of at Saint Helena, and the ordinary ways of mortals had their place in the world again.
The Congress of Vienna rea.s.sembled, and the readjustment of the map of Europe began over again. Prussia is given back what had been taken away from her. A German confederation was formed in 1815 to resist encroachments, but with no definite political idea, and its diet, to which Prussia, Austria, and the other smaller states sent representatives, became the laughing-stock of Europe. Jealous bickerings and insistence upon silly formalities paralyzed legislation. Lawyers and others who presented their claims before this a.s.sembly from 1806-1816 were paid in 1843! The liquidation of the debts of the Thirty Years' War was made after two hundred years, in 1850! The laws for the military forces were finally agreed upon in 1821, and put in force in 1840!
There were three princ.i.p.al forms of government among these states: first, Absolutist, where the ruler and his officials governed without reference to the people, as in Prussia and Austria; second, those who organized a.s.semblies (Landslande), where no promises were made to the people, but where the n.o.bles and notables were called together for consultation; and third, a sort of const.i.tutional monarchy with a written const.i.tution and elected representatives, but with the ruler none the less supreme. One of the first rulers to grant such a const.i.tution to his people was the Grand Duke who presided over the little court at Weimar.
The ma.s.s of the people were wholly indifferent. The intellectuals were divided among themselves. The schools and universities after 1818 form a.s.sociations and societies, the Burschenschaft, for example, and in a hazy professorial fas.h.i.+on talk and shout of freedom. They were of those pa.s.sionate lovers of liberty, more intent on the dower than on the bride; willing to talk and sing and to tell the world of their own deserts, but with little iron in their blood.
When a real man wants to be free he fights, he does not talk; he takes what he wants and asks for it afterward; he spends himself first and affords it afterward. These dreamy gentlemen could never make the connection between their a.s.sertions and their actions. They were as inconsistent, as a man who sees nothing unreasonable in circulating ascetic opinions and a perambulator at the same time. They were dreary and technical advocates of liberty.
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