Part 5 (2/2)
The tonnage of steam vessels under 4,000 tons in Great Britain (net tons) was, some five years ago, 8,165,527; in Germany (gross tons), 977,410; but the tonnage of steam vessels of 4,000 tons and over was in Great Britain 1,446,486, in Germany 1,119,537! It should be added that no small part of Great Britain's big s.h.i.+ps belong to the American s.h.i.+pping Trust, sailing under the British flag. Albert Ballin became a director of the Hamburg-American line in 1886, and was made general director in 1900. During his directors.h.i.+p the capital of the line has been increased from 15,000,000 to 125,000,000 of marks, and the number of steamers from 26 to 170.
Germany's combined export and import trade in 1880 was $1,429,025,000; in 1890, $1,875,050,000; and in 1905 it was $3,324,018,000; in 1910, $4,019,072,250. The German production of coal and coal products in 1910 was the highest in its history, amounting to 265,148,232 metric tons. It would be easy enough to chronicle the commercial and industrial strides of Germany during the last quarter of a century by the compilation of a catalogue of figures. It is not my intention to persuade the reader to believe in any such fantastic theory as that the present Kaiser is entirely responsible for this progress. I am no Pygmalion that I can make an Emperor by breathing prayers before pages of statistics.
It is only fair, however, in any sketch of the Emperor to give this skeleton outline of what has taken place in the empire over which he rules, and which, in certain quarters, it is said, he menaces by his predilection for war. These few figures spell peace, they do not spell war, and the ruler who has some 700,000 armed men at his back, and a navy the second in strength in the world guarding his sh.o.r.es, and a mercantile marine carrying his trade which is hard on the heels of Great Britain as a rival, but who has none the less kept his country at peace with the world for twenty-five years, may be credited at least with good intentions.
It may be said in answer to this same argument that this building and training and enriching of a nation are a threat in themselves. True, a strong man is more dangerous than a weak one; but it is equally true that a strong man is a greater safeguard than a weak one where the question of peace is at stake. It is also true that a rich and powerful man must needs take more precautions against attack and robbery than a tramp. A tramp seldom carries even a bunch of keys, and pays no premium on fire, accident, or burglary insurance.
William the Second knows his history as well as any of his people, and incomparably better than his English, French, or American critics. He knows that only twenty years after the death of Frederick the Great, the Prussian power went down before Napoleon like a house of cards, and that the country's humiliation was stamped in bold outlines when Napoleon was received in Berlin with the ringing of bells, the firing of cannons, and he himself greeted as a savior and a benefactor. That was only a hundred years ago. Is it an indiscretion, then, when the present ruler, speaking at Brandenburg the 5th of March, 1890, says: ”I look upon the people and nation handed on to me as a responsibility conferred upon me by G.o.d, and that it is, as is written in the Bible, my duty to increase this heritage, for which one day I shall be called upon to give an account; those who try to interfere with my task, I shall crush”?
On his accession to the throne his first two proclamations were to the army and the navy, his third to the people. On the 14th of July, 1888, he reviewed the fleet at Kiel, and for the first time an Emperor of Germany and King of Prussia appeared there in the uniform of an admiral. In April, 1897, Queen Victoria celebrated the sixtieth year of her reign, and Prince Henry represented Germany, appearing as admiral of the fleet in an old battle-s.h.i.+p, the King William. On the 24th of April the Emperor telegraphed to his brother: ”I regret exceedingly that I cannot put at your disposition for this celebration a better s.h.i.+p, especially when all other countries are appearing with their finest s.h.i.+ps of war. It is a sad consequence of the manoeuvring of those unpatriotic persons who have obstructed the construction of even the most necessary war-s.h.i.+ps. But I shall know no rest till I have placed our navy on a par for strength with our army.” From that day to this he has gone steadily forward demanding of his people a strong army and a powerful fleet. He now has both. He has pulled Germany out of danger and beyond the reach, for the moment at least, of any repet.i.tion of the catastrophe and humiliation of a hundred years ago. This is a solid fact, and for this situation the Emperor is largely, one might almost say wholly, responsible.
One hears and one reads criticisms of the Emperor's habit of speaking and writing of ”my navy.” It is said that the other states of Germany have borne taxation to build the fleet, and that it is no more the Emperor's than that of the King of Bavaria, or of Wurtemberg, or of Saxony. This is the petty, pin-p.r.i.c.king babble of boarding-school girls, or of those official supernumeraries who have turned sour in their retirement. Even the honest democrat is made indignant. If the German navy is not the work of William the Second, then its parentage is far to seek; and if the German navy is not proud to be called ”my navy,” it is wofully lacking in grat.i.tude to its creator.
No man who looks back over his own career, say of twenty-five years, but is both chastened and amused. He is chastened by the unforeseen dangers that he has escaped; he is amused by the certificates of failure, and the prophecies of disaster, that always everywhere accompany the man who takes part in the game in preference to sitting in the reserved seats, or peeking through a hole in the fence. I have not been honored with any such intimate a.s.sociation with the German Emperor as would enable me to say whether he has a highly developed sense of humor or not. I can only say for myself, that if I had lived through his Majesty's last twenty-five years, I should need no other fillip to digestion than my chuckles over the prophecies of my enemies.
It has been said of him that he is volatile; that he flies from one task to another, finis.h.i.+ng nothing; that his artistic tastes are the extravagant dreams of a Nero; that he loves publicity as a worn and obese soprano loves the centre of the stage; that his indiscretions would bring about the discharge of the most inconspicuous petty official. Others speak and write of him as a hero of mythology, as a mystic and a dreamer, looking for guidance to the traditions of mediaeval knighthood; while others, again, dub him a modernist, insist that he is a commercial traveller, hawking the wares of his country wherever he goes, and with an eye ever to the interests of Bremen and Hamburg and Essen and Pforzheim. Again, you hear that he is a Prussian junker, or that he is a cavalry officer, with all the prejudices and limitations of such a one; while, on the other hand, he is chided for enlisting the financial help of rich Jews and industrials. He is versatile, but versatility is a virtue so long as it does not extend to one's principles. Every man who has profoundly influenced the life of the world, from Moses to Lincoln, has been versatile. Carlyle goes so far as to say: ”I confess, I have no notion of a truly great man that could not be all sorts of men.” He speaks French well enough to address the Academie; he speaks English as well as a cultivated American, and no one speaks it more distinctly, more crisply, more trippingly upon the tongue, these days; he preaches a capital sermon; he is an accomplished binder of books; he is a successful and enthusiastic farmer, and he is frankly audacious in his loves and hatreds, his ambitions and his beliefs. He has, in short, no vermin blood in him at any rate. If you do not like him, you know why; and if you do, you know why as easily. He even knows what he believes about woman's suffrage and about G.o.d, a rare conciseness of thinking in these troublous times.
There stands before you a man apparently as sound in mind and in body as any man who treads German soil; a man of great vivacity of mind and manner, and of wholesome delight in living; who bears huge responsibilities with good humor, and that most unwholesome of all things, undisputed power, with humility. At a banquet in Brandenburg the 5th of March, 1890, speaking of his many voyages, he said: ”He who, alone at sea, standing on the bridge, with nothing over him but G.o.d's heaven, has communed with himself will not mistake the value of such voyages. I could wish for many of my countrymen that they might live through similar hours of self-contemplation, where a man takes stock of what he has tried to do, and of what he has accomplished.
Then it is that a man is cured of vanity, and we have all of us need of that.”
It is obvious that a man cannot be modest, as the above quotation would indicate, and at the same time preening with vanity; a Sir Philip Sidney and a Jew peddler; a careless, das.h.i.+ng cavalry officer or proud Prussian squire, and at the same time a wary and astute insurance agent for the empire; a preacher of duty and honor, and belief in G.o.d, and at the same time a political comedian deceiving his rivals abroad, and hoodwinking his subjects at home.
Not a few men, even of slight powers of observation and of meagre experience, have noted the strange fact that a blank and direct statement of the truth is very apt to be put down as a lie; and that a man who frankly expresses his beliefs and ambitions, and openly goes about his business and his pleasures with no thought of concealment, is often regarded as Machiavellian and deceitful, because a timid and cautious world finds it hard to believe that he is really as audacious as he appears.
Even those with the most limited list, of the great names of history at their disposal, cannot fail to remember that simplicity and directness have in the persons of their highest exemplars been misunderstood; hunted down like wild beasts, burned, crucified, and then, when they were well out of the way, crowned and held up to humanity as the saviors of the race. We will have none of them when authority, faith, truth, courage, show us our distorted images in the mirror of their lives. Crucify him, crucify him! has always been the cry when such a one a.s.serts his moral kings.h.i.+p, or his sons.h.i.+p to G.o.d, or his audacious intention to live his own life; and in less tragic fas.h.i.+on, but none the less along the same lines, the world tends to pick at, and to fray the moral garments of, its leaders still to-day.
When such a one succeeds through sheer simplicity, then that last feeble epitaph of mediocrity is applied to him: ”He is lucky,” because so few people realize that ”luck,” is merely not to be dependent upon luck.
It is apparent from the quotations I have given, and many more of the same tenor are at our disposal, that the personality we are studying has a very definite image of his place in the world, of the duties he is called upon to perform, of his rights according to his own conception of his authority and responsibilities, and of his intentions.
It is equally apparent that he looks upon history in quite another way than that usually accepted by the modern scientific historian. Taine and Green may explain everything, even kings and emperors, by the forces of climate, environment, and the slow-heaving influence of the people. This school of historians will tell you how Charlemagne, and Luther, and Cromwell, and Napoleon are to be accounted for by purely material explanations.
The German Emperor apparently believes that the history of the world and the development of mankind are due to a series of mighty factors, mysteriously endowed from on high and bearing the names of men, and not infrequently the names of emperors and kings. He is continually recalling his ancestors, the Great Elector, Frederick the Great, and William I, his grandfather. These men made Prussia and Prussia made the German Empire, he declares. To the Brandenburg Parliament he says: ”It is the great merit of my ancestors that they have always stood aloof from and above all parties, and that they have always succeeded in making political parties combine for the welfare of the whole people.”
Due to a quality in the German character that need not be discussed here, it is true that they have been led, and driven, and welded by powerful individuals. No Magna Charta, no Cromwell, no Declaration of Independence is to be found in German history. No vigorous demand from the people themselves marks their progress. You can read all there is of German history in the biographies of the Great Elector, of Frederick William the First, of Frederick the Great, of York, of von Stein, Hardenberg, Sharnhorst, and Blucher, of Bismarck, William I, and the present Emperor.
What the Kaiser believes of history is true of German history. If he a.s.serts himself as he does in Germany, it is because two hundred and fifty years of German history put him wholly and entirely in the right. It is to be presumed that what every student of German history may see for himself, has not escaped the flexible intelligence of the present Emperor, and that is, that only the autocratic kings of Prussia succeeded, and that only an autocratic statesman succeeded, in bringing the whole country into line, by the acknowledgment of the King of Prussia, and his heirs forever, as German emperors.
The first so-called indiscretion of the present Emperor was magnificent. He dismissed Bismarck two years after he came to the throne. If you have ever been the owner of a yacht and your sailing-master has grown to be a tyrant, and you have taken your courage in your hand and bundled him over the side, you have had in a microcosmic way the sensations of such an experience.
It is said that Bismarck, then seventy-five years old, and since 1862 accustomed to undisputed power, demurred to the wish of the Emperor that the other ministers should have access to him directly, and not as heretofore only through the chancellor. It is said too that the matter-of-fact and somewhat cynical Bismarck, had but scanty respect for the mystical view of his grandfather as a saint, that the Emperor everywhere proclaimed. In 1896, the 20th of February, in speaking of his grandfather, he refers to him as: ”The Emperor William, that personality which has become for us in some sort that of a saint.”
Bismarck, too, objected to the Emperor's policy as regards the treatment of, and the legislation for, the workingmen. On February the 5th, 1890, he writes to Bismarck: ”It is the duty of the state to regulate the duration and conditions of work in such manner that the health and the morality of the workingman may be preserved, and that his needs may be satisfied and his desire for equality before the law a.s.sured.”
”Now this is the tale of the Council the German Kaiser decreed,
”And the young king said:?'I have found it, the road to the rest ye seek:
The strong shall wait for the weary, and the hale shall halt for the weak;
With the even tramp of an army where no man breaks from the line,
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