Part 5 (1/2)
It is a fine quality in a man to be in love with his job. Even though you have little sympathy with Savonarola's fierceness or Wesley's hardness, they were burning up all the time with their allegiance to their ideals of salvation. They served their Lord as lovers. Many men, even kings and princes and other potentates, give the impression that they would enjoy a holiday from their task. They seem to be harnessed to their duties rather than possessed by them; they appear like disillusioned husbands rather than as radiant lovers.
The German Emperor is not of that cla.s.s. He loves his job. In his first proclamation to his people he declared that he had taken over the government ”in the presence of the King of kings, promising G.o.d to be a just and merciful prince, cultivating piety and the fear of G.o.d.”
He has proclaimed himself to be, as did Frederick the Great and his grandfather before him, the servant of his people. Certainly no one in the German Empire works harder, and what is far more difficult and far more self-denying, no one keeps himself fitter for his duties than he.
He eats no red meat, drinks almost no alcohol, smokes very little, takes a very light meal at night, goes to bed early and gets up early.
He rides, walks, shoots, plays tennis, and is as much in the open air as his duties permit.
It is not easy for the American to put side by side the att.i.tudes of a man, who is the autocratic master and at the same time declares himself to be the first servant of his people. Perhaps if it is phrased differently it will not seem so contradictory. What this Emperor means, and what all princes who have believed in their right to rule meant, was not that they were the servants of their people, but the servants of their own obligations to their people, and of the duties that followed therefrom. If in addition to this the claim is made by the sovereign, that his right to rule is of divine origin, then his service to his obligations becomes of the highest and most sacred importance.
We should not allow our democratic prejudices to stifle our understanding in such matters. We are trying to get clearly in perspective a ruler, who claims to rule in obedience to no mandates from the people, but in obedience to G.o.d. We could not be ruled by such a one in America; and in England such a ruler would be deemed unconst.i.tutional. It is elementary, but necessary to repeat, that we are writing of Germany and the Germans, and of their history, traditions, and political methods. We are making no defence of either the German Emperor or the German people; neither are we occupying an American pulpit to preach to them the superiority of other methods than their own. My sole task is to make clear the German situation, and not by any means to set up my own or my countrymen's standards for their adoption. I am not searching for that paltry and ephemeral profit that comes from finding opportunities to laugh or to sneer. I am seeking for the German successes, and they are many, and for the reasons for them, and for the lessons that we may learn from them. Any other aim in writing of another people is ign.o.ble.
This att.i.tude of the ruler will be as incomprehensible to the democratic citizen as alchemy, but, in order to draw anything like true inferences or useful deductions, in order to understand the situation and to get a true likeness of the ruler, one must take this utterly unfamiliar and to us incomprehensible claim into consideration, and acknowledge its existence whether we admit the claim as justifiable or not. The relation of such a ruler to his people is like that of a Catholic bishop to his flock. The contract is not one made with hands, but is an inalienable right on the one hand, and an undisseverable tie upon the other. Bismarck wrote on this subject: ”Fur mich sind die Worte, 'von Gottes Gnaden,' welche christliche Herrscher ihrem Namen beifugen, kein leerer Schall, sondern ich sehe darin das Bekenntniss, des Fursten das Scepter was ihnen Gott verliehen hat, nur nach Gottes Willen auf Erden fuhren wollen.”
On several occasions the German Emperor has made it unmistakably clear that this is his view of the origin and sanct.i.ty of his responsibilities. ”If we have been able to accomplish what has been accomplished, it is due above all things to the fact that our house possesses a tradition by virtue of which we consider that we have been appointed by G.o.d to preserve and direct, for their own welfare, the people over whom he has given us power.” These words are from a speech made in 1897 at Bremen. In 1910, at Konigsberg, he declares: ”It was in this spot that my grandfather in his own right placed the royal crown of Prussia upon his head, insisting once again that it was bestowed upon him by the grace of G.o.d alone, and not by parliaments and meetings and decisions of the people. He thus regarded himself as the chosen instrument of heaven, and as such carried out his duties as a ruler and lord. I consider myself such an instrument of heaven, and shall go my way without regard to the views and opinions of the day.”
Prince Henry of Prussia, the popular, and deservedly popular, sailor brother of the Emperor, has signified his entire allegiance to this doctrine by saying that he was actuated by one single motive: ”a desire to proclaim to the nations the gospel of your Majesty's sacred person, and to preach that gospel alike to those who will listen and to those who will not.”
This language has a strange and far-away sound to us. It is as though one should come into the market-place with the bannered pomp of Milton's prose upon his lips. The vicious would think it a trick, the idle would look upon it as a heavy form of joking, the intelligent would see in it a superst.i.tion, or a dream of knighthood that has faded into unrecognizable dimness. Some men, on the other hand, might wish that all rulers and governors whatsoever were equally touched with the sanct.i.ty of their obligations.
It is somewhat strange in this connection to remember, that we all wish to have our wives and daughters believers; that we all wish to bind to us those whom we love with more sacred bonds than those which we ourselves can supply. We are none of us loath to have those who keep our treasures, believe in some code higher than that of ”honesty is the best policy.” As Archbishop Whately said: ”Honesty is the best policy, but he who is honest for that reason is not an honest man.”
Far be it from me to appear as an advocate of the divine right of kings; but I am no fit person for this particular task if I have only a sniff, or a guffaw, as an explanation of another's beliefs. History sparkles with the lives of men and women, who proclaimed themselves messengers and servants of G.o.d, obedient to him first, and utterly and courageously negligent of that feline commodity, public opinion. Every man, even to-day,
”Who each for the joy of the working, and each in his separate star, Shall draw the Thing as he sees It for the G.o.d of Things as They Are,”
has a grain of this salt of divine independence in him. To-day, even as in the days of Pericles: ”It is ever from the greatest hazards that the greatest honors are gained,” and the greatest hazard of all is to shut your visor and couch your lance and have at your task with a whispered: G.o.d and my Right! It is well to remember that under no government, whether democratic or aristocratic, has the individual ever been given any rights. He has always everywhere been pointed to his duties; his rights he must conquer for himself.
The liberal in theology, as the liberal in politics, has perhaps leaned too far toward softness. The democratization of religion has gone on with the rest, and in our rebound from Calvin, and John Knox, and Jonathan Edwards, we have left all discipline and authority out of account. We have preached so persistently of the fatherhood of G.o.d, of his nearness to us, of his profound pity for us, that we have lost sight of his justice and his power. This nearness has become a sort of innocuous neighborliness, and G.o.d is looked upon not as a ruler, but as a vaporish good fellow whose chief business it is to forgive. We have subst.i.tuted a feverish-handed charity for a sinewy faith, and are excusing our divorce from divinely imposed duties, by a cheerful but illicit intercourse with chance acquaintances, all of whom are dubbed social service.
This Cashmere-shawl theology is as idle an interpretation of man's relation to the universe, and far more debilitating, than any that has gone before. When we come to measure rulers who make divine claims for their duties, from any such coign of flabbiness as this, no wonder we stand dumb. I am willing to concede that perhaps even an emperor has been baptized with the blood of the martyrs, and feels himself to be in all sincerity the instrument of G.o.d; if we are to understand this one, we must admit so much.
In certain departments of life, we not only grant, but we demand, that our wives and mothers should look upon their special duties and peculiar functions as divinely imparted, and as beyond argument, and as above coercion. This a.s.sumption, therefore, of inalienable rights is not so strange to us; on the contrary, it is an every-day affair in most of our lives. This particular manifestation of it is all that is new or surprising. We Americans and English look upon it as dangerous, but the Germans, more mystical and far more lethargic about liberty than are we, are not greatly disturbed by it. The secular press, largely in Jewish hands, and the new socialist members of the Reichstag, jealous of their prerogatives but unable to a.s.sert them, criticise and even scream their abhorrence and unbelief; but I am much mistaken, if the ma.s.s of the Germans are at heart much disturbed by their Emperor's a.s.sertions of his divine right to rule. A conservative member of the Reichstag speaks of, ”a parliament which will maintain the monarch in his strong position as the wearer of the German imperial crown, not the semblance of a monarch but one that is dependent upon something higher than party and parliament--one dependent upon the King of all kings.”
To a thoroughbred American, with two and more centuries of the traditions of independence behind him, this question of the divine right of kings is a commonplace. He is a king himself, he holds his own rights to be divine, and his influence and his power to be limited only by his character and his abilities, like that of any other sovereign. He may rule over few or many, he may control the destiny of only one or of many subjects, he may be well known or little known, but that he is a sovereign individual by the grace of G.o.d, it never occurs to him to doubt. It is perhaps for this reason that the real American is placid and unself-conscious before this claim. It is those who admit and suffer from the exactions and tyrannies of such a claim that he pities, not the man who makes it, whom he distrusts. I carry my sovereignty under my hat, says the American; if any man or men can knock off the hat and take away the sovereignty, there is a fair field and no favor; for those who whimper and complain of tyranny he has long since ceased to have a high regard.
That William the Second is the chief figure of interest in the world to-day is due, not alone to this a.s.sumption of a divine relation to the state, or to his own vigorous and electric personality, but to the freedom to develop and to express that personality. Men in politics have dwindled in importance and in power, as the voters have increased in numbers and in influence. Genius must be true to itself to bloom luxuriantly. It is impossible to be seeking the suffrage of a const.i.tuency and at the same time to be wholly one's self. The German Emperor is unhampered, as is no other ruler, by considerations of popular favor; and at the same time he directs and influences not Russian peasants, nor Turkish slaves, but an instructed, enlightened, and ambitious people. This environment is unique in the world to-day, and the Germans as a whole seem to consider their ruler a valuable a.s.set, despite occasional vagaries that bring down their own and foreign criticism upon him.
Here we have a versatile and vigorous personality with no shadow of a stain upon his character, and with no question upon the part of his bitterest enemy of the honesty of his intentions, or of his devotion to his country's interests. So far as he has been a.s.sailed abroad, it is on the score that he has made his country so powerful in the last twenty-five years that Germany is a menace to other powers; so far as he has been criticised at home it is on the score of his indiscretions.
It is of prime importance, therefore, both to glance at the progress of Germany and to examine these so-called indiscretions. Throughout these chapters will be found facts and figures dealing with the fairy-like change which has taken place in Germany since my own student days. I can remember when a chimney was a rare sight. Now there are almost as many manufacturing towns as then there were chimneys.
Leipzig was a big country town, Pforzheim, Chemnitz, Oschatz, Elberfeld, Riessa, Kiel, Essen, Rheinhausen, and their armies of laborers, and their millions of output, were mere shadows of what they are now.
In 1873, when Bismarck began his attempts at railway legislation, Germany was divided into sixty-three ”railway provinces,” and there were fifteen hundred different tariffs, and it is to be remembered that it was only as late as 1882 that the state system of railways at last triumphed in Prussia. In only ten years the railway trackage has increased from 49,041 to 52,216 miles; the number of locomotives from 18,291 to 26,612; freight-cars from 398,000 to 558,000; the pa.s.sengers carried from 804,000,000 to 1,457,000,000; and the tons of freight carried from 341,000,000 tons to 519,000,000 tons. In Prussia alone there are 1,000,000 more horses, 1,000,000 more beef cattle, and 10,000,000 more pigs. The total production of beet sugar in the world approximates 7,000,000 tons; of this amount Germany produces 2,500,000 tons. Great Britain consumes more sugar per head of the population than any other country, and of her consumption of 1,460,000 tons of beet sugar all of it is produced from beets grown on the continent.
Between 1885 and 1912 the population increased from 46,000,000 to 66,000,000. The expenditure on the navy has increased in the last ten years from $47,500,000 to $110,000,000, and the number of men from 31,157 to 60,805, with another increase in both money and men, voted at the moment of this writing in the summer of 1912.
The debt of Germany, exclusive of paper money, in 1887 was 486,201,000 marks; in 1903 it stood at 2,733,500,000. In 1911 the funded debt of the empire was 4,524,000,000 marks, and the funded debt of the states 14,880,000,000; and the floating debt amounts to 991,000,000, of which Prussia alone bears 610,000,000 and the empire 300,000,000. Between the years 1871 and 1897 a debt of $500,000,000 was incurred, bearing an average interest charge of 3 3/4 per cent. In the year 1908 the combined expenditures of the states and of the empire reached the enormous total of $1,775,000,000. The debt of the city of Berlin alone in 1910 had reached $110,750,000 and has increased in the last two years.
For purposes of comparison one may note that our own later national budgets run roughly to $1,000,000,000. The British budget for 1911 was $906,420,000. After the French war, speculation on a large scale ensued. The payment of the $1,000,000,000 indemnity had a bad effect.
As has often happened in America, money, or the mere means of exchange, was taken for wealth. The earth will be as cold as the moon before men learn that the only real wealth is health. Many schemes and companies were floated and after 1873 there was a prolonged financial crisis in Germany. It is said that bankruptcy and the liquidation of bubble companies entailed a loss of a round $90,000,000. It was in 1876-7, when Germany was thus suffering, that the policy of protection was mooted and finally put into operation by Bismarck in 1879. Ten years later the laws for accident, old age, and sickness insurance were pa.s.sed, at the instigation and under the direct influence of the present Emperor.