Part 18 (1/2)
I am not discussing here the question of compulsory service in England. It is not difficult to see that part of England's army must of necessity be a professional army, which can be sent here and there and everywhere, and that conscription would not answer the purpose, for compulsory conscription could hardly demand of its recruits that they should serve in India, in Canada, or in Bermuda or Egypt, for the length of time necessary to make their service of value. Conscription, too, on a scale to make an army serviceable against the trained troops of the Continent is out of the question. Therefore, so far as compulsory service for military duty only is concerned, I see no hope for it in England. But in a land of free men such as is, or used to be, England, and in America, compulsory service ought to be undertaken with pride and with pleasure, as a moral, not as a military, duty for the salvation of the country from internal foes, and as a nucleus around which could rally the nation as a whole in case of attack from external foes. Patriotism among us has come to a pretty pa.s.s indeed when the nation is divided into two cla.s.ses: those growling against the taxation of their surplus; and those with their tongues hanging out in antic.i.p.ation of, and their hands clutching for, unearned doles.
And now, the more shame to us, must be added a third cla.s.s who use public office for private profit. What if we all turned to and gave something without being forced to do so? Where would the ”Yellow peril” and the ”German menace” be then? We should have much less exciting and inciting talk and writing if our nerves and digestions were in better order. Nothing calms the nerves, increases confidence, and lessens the chance of promiscuous quarrelling better than hard work.
Even if what the German army has accomplished along these lines were not true, there can be no freedom of political speculation or experiment, no time to make mistakes and to retrieve the situation, when one is surrounded on all sides by overt or potential enemies.
Germany must have a powerful army and fleet, must have a strong and autocratic government, or she is lost. ”Ohne Armee kein Deutschland.”
She can permit no silly, no stupid, no excited majority to imperil her safety as a nation. If Germany were governed as is France, where they have had nine new governments since the beginning of the twentieth century, and forty-four since the republic replaced the empire forty-one years ago--not counting six dismissals of the cabinet when the prime minister remained--or fifty changes of government in less than that number of years, Germany would have lost her place on the map.
France remains only because, so far as defence is concerned, France is France plus the British fleet.
Political geography is the sufficient reason for Germany's army and navy. Let us be fair in these judgments and admit at once, that if j.a.pan were where Mexico is, and Russia where Canada is, and Germany separated from us by a few hours' steaming, certain peace-mongers would have been hanged long ago, and our cooing doves of peace would have had molten tar mixed with their feathers. An Italian proverb runs, ”It is easy to scoff at a bull from a window,” and we indulge in not a little of such babyish effrontery from our safe place in the world. Germany, on the other hand, looks out upon the world from no such safe window-seat; she is down in the ring, and must be prepared at all hazards to take care of herself. That is a reason, too, why Germany offers little resistance to the ruling of an autocratic militarism. The sailors and the stokers would rather obey captain and officers, however they may have been chosen for them, than to be sunk at sea; and nowadays Germany is ever on the high seas, battling hard to protect and to increase her commerce abroad, and to protect her huge industrial population at home. Germany can take no chances for the moment, for only ”Wer sich regiert, der ist mit Zufall fertig.”
One wishes often that one's lips were not sealed, one's pen not stayed by the imperious demands of honor, to abstain from all mention of discoveries or conversations made under the roof of hospitality, for nothing could well be more enlightening than a description of a chat between the great war-lord of Germany and a leading pacifist: the one completely equipped with knowledge of the history, temper, and temperament of his people; the other obsessed by a fantastic exaggeration of the power and influence of money, even in the world of culture and international politics, and preaching his panacea in the land, of all others, where even now mere money has the least influence, all honor to that land!
Spinoza, the greatest of modern Jews, and the father of modern philosophy, writes: ”It is not enough to point out what ought to be; we must also point out what can be, so that every one may receive his due without depriving others of what is due to them.” And in another place: ”Things should not be the subject of ridicule or complaint, but should be understood.” Those who know little of the history of the development of Germany, and particularly of Prussia, cannot possibly understand another reason for the political apathy of the Germans and their pleased support of their army. It is this: they have been trained in everything except self-government, in everything except politics. Perhaps their governors know them better than we do. Their progress has come from direction from above, not from a.s.sertion from below. The art or arts of self-government, throughout their development as a nation, have been forcibly omitted from their curriculum. Every step in our national progress, on the contrary, has been taken by the people, shoulder to shoulder, breaking their way up and out into light and freedom. There is little or no trace of any such movement of the people in Germany, and there is little taste for it, and no experience to make such effort successful. We, who have profited by the teaching of this political experience, do not realize in the least how handicapped are the people who have not had it.
One hundred years ago half the inhabitants of Prussia were practically in the toils of serfdom. It was only by an edict of 1807, to take effect in 1810, that personal serfdom with its consequences, especially the oppressive obligation of menial service, was abolished in the Prussian monarchy. Caste extended actually to land. All land had a certain status, from which the owners and their retainers took their political position and rights. The edict of 1807 was in reality a land reform bill, and gave for the first time free trade in land in Prussia. It was vom Stein, a Bismarck born too soon, who induced Frederick William II, King of Prussia, and grandson of the Great Elector, to abolish serfdom, to open the civil service to all cla.s.ses, and to concede certain munic.i.p.al rights to the towns. But vom Stein was dismissed from the service of his weak-kneed sovereign on the ground that he was an enemy of France, and was obliged to take refuge in Russia. Like other martyrs, his efforts watered the political earth for a fruitful harvest.
It is well to know where we are in the world's culture and striving when we speak of other nations. What were we doing, what was the rest of the world doing, in those days when the Hanoverian peasant's son, Scharnhorst, and Clausewitz were about to lay the foundations of this German army, now the most perfect machine of its kind in the world?
These were the days prepared for by Jonathan Edwards, Benjamin Franklin, Voltaire, Rousseau; by Pitt and Louis XV, and George III; the days of near memories of Wolfe, Montcalm, and Clive; days when Hogarth was caricaturing London; days when the petticoats of the Pompadour swept both India and Canada into the possession of England.
These names and the atmosphere they produce, show by comparison how rough a fellow was this Prussia of only a hundred years ago. He had not come into the circle of the polite or of the political world. He was tumbling about, un-licked, untaught, inexperienced, already forgetful of the training of the greatest school-master of the previous century, Frederick the Great, who had made a man of him.
We were already politicians to a man in those days, and the Englishman Pitt was map-maker, by special warrant, to all Europe.
When the Prussians were serfs politically, our House of Representatives, in 1796, debated whether to insert in their reply to the President's speech the remark that ”this nation is the freest and most enlightened in the world.” It is true that this was at the time when Europe was producing Lessing, Goethe, Schiller, Kant, Hegel, Fichte, Mozart, Haydn, Herschel, and about ready to introduce Walter Scott, Wordsworth, Sh.e.l.ley, Heine, Balzac, Beethoven, and Cuvier; when Turner was painting, Watt building the steam-engine, Napoleon in command of the French armies, and Nelson of the British fleet; but this bombastic babble of ours harmed n.o.body then, and only serves to show what a number of intellectual serfs must have been members of that particular House of Representatives.
We have not overcome this habit of slapdash comparative criticism, for only the other day a distinguished American inventor left Berlin with these words as his final message: ”We have nothing to learn from Germany.” But in the nineteenth century, where does the American of sober intelligence, if Lincoln be omitted, find a match for Bismarck as a statesman, Heine as a wit and song-writer, Wagner, Brahms, and Beethoven as musicians, Goethe as a man of letters and poet, the still living influence of Lessing and Winckelmann as critics, Fichte as a scholarly patriot, Hegel and Kant as philosophers, von Humboldt, Liebig, Helmholtz, Bunsen, and Haeckel as scientists, Moltke and Roon as soldiers, Ranke and Mommsen as historians, Auerbach, Spielhagen, Sudermann, Freytag, ”Fritz” Reuter, and Hauptmann as novelists and dramatists, Krupp and Borsig as manufacturers, and the Rothschilds as bankers? Lincoln, Lee, Sherman, Jackson, and Grant may equal these men in their own departments, but aside from them our only superiority, and a very questionable superiority it is, lies in our trust-and-tariff- incubated millionaires. Let us try to see straight, if only that we may learn and profit by the superiority of others.
These explanations that I have given, historical, political, external, and internal, offer reasons worth pondering both why we do not understand Germany's huge armament and why Germany looks upon it as a necessity.
However much the expenditure on fleet and army may be disguised, the burden is colossal. In the year 1878 the net expenditure, ordinary and extraordinary, for purposes of defence, for army and navy and all other military purposes whatsoever including pensions, amounted to 452,000,000 marks; in 1888, to 660,000,000 marks; in 1898, to 882,000,000 marks; and in 1908, to 1,481,000,000 marks.
The total expenses, net, of the empire in 1908 were 1,735,000,000 marks, showing that only 254,000,000 marks out of the grand total of 1,735,000,000 were spent for other than military purposes. As the army and navy now stand at a peace strength of some 700,000 men, and as these men are all in the prime of their working power, the loss in wages and in productive work may be put very conservatively at 600,000,000 marks, which brings the cost of the support of the military establishment of Germany up to 2,000,000,000 marks and more per annum, or $500,000,000.
Many Americans were dismayed when our total national expenditure reached the $1,000,000,000 point, and the Congress voting this expenditure was nicknamed the ”Billion-dollar Congress.” What would we say of an expenditure of half a billion dollars for defence alone!
With what admiration, too, must we regard 65,000,000 people, living in an area one quarter smaller than Texas, on a by-no-means rich or fertile soil, who can bear cheerfully the burden, each year, of half our total national expenditure, merely on the military and naval barricade which enables them to toil in peace and security.
Humanity has, indeed, made but a poor zigzag progress from the gorilla; Christianity, just now engaged in blessing the rival banners of warriors setting out for one another's throats, has failed ignominiously to bring the wolf in man to baptism, when the central state of Christian Europe must arm to the teeth one in every eighteen of her adult male inhabitants, and spend half a billion dollars a year, to protect herself from a.s.sault and plunder.
If the hairy, skin-clad cave-dwellers, or the man who left us the Neanderthal skull, could have a look at us now, here in Berlin, in many ways the centre of the most enlightened people in the world, they would undoubtedly go mad trying to understand what we mean by the word ”progress.” And yet we smile indulgently at the poor farmers in Afghanistan who till their fields with a rifle slung across their shoulders. What is Germany doing but that! And an enormously heavy rifle it is, costing just seven times as much as all other national expenditures together; in short, it costs seven marks of soldier to protect every one mark of plough. I admit frankly the horror and the absurdity of all this; but as an argument for disarmament, ”it does not lie,” as the lawyers phrase it. It is a criticism, and an unanswerable one, of our failure as human beings to enthrone reason and to tame our pa.s.sions; but it is a veritable call to arms to protect ourselves, not a reason for not doing so. Let the international gluttons overeat themselves till they are seriously ill; but it would be madness to starve ourselves in the meantime, and yet that is the grotesque logic of certain of our preachers of disarmament.
At the moment of writing there are 1,000,000 men at each other's throats in the Balkans, there is a revolution in Mexico, and incipient anarchy in Central America; as an emollient to this, Great Britain is about to present a bust of the late King Edward to the Peace Palace at the Hague! I can imagine myself saying ”Pretty p.u.s.s.y, nice p.u.s.s.y,” to the wild-cats I have shot in Nebraska and Dakota, but I should not be here if I had; and however small my value to the world I live in, I estimate it as worth at least a ton of wild-cats.
I am bound, however, in fairness to call the attention of the unwary dabbler in statistics to a point of grave importance in dealing with German finances. The German Empire, so far as expenditure and income are concerned, is merely an office, a clearing-house so to speak, for the states which together make up the empire. The expenses of the empire, for example, in 1910 were $757,900,000 and of the army and navy, including extraordinary expenditures, $314,919,325; this does not include pensions, clerical expenses, interest, sinking-fund, and loss of productive labor, as did the figures on a preceding page. To the ignorant or to the malicious, who quote these figures to bolster up a socialist or pacifist preachment, this looks as though Germany had spent one half of her grand total on the army and navy. But this is quite wrong. In addition to the expenditures of this imperial clearing-house called the German Empire, there was spent by the states $1,467,325,000: the so-called clearinghouse bearing the whole burden of expenses for army and navy, the separate states nothing except the per capita tax, called the matriculation tax, of some 80 pfennigs. To make this matter still more clear, as it is a constant source of error not only to the foreigner but to the Germans themselves, the income of the empire for 1910 was $757,900,000, the income of all the states $1,463,150,000, or of the empire and the states combined $2,221,050,000. In the same way the debt of the empire in 1910 stood at $1,224,150,000, and the debt of the states of the empire at $3,856,325,000, or a grand total outstanding indebtedness of all Germany of $5,080,475,000.
Of late years the imperial expenditure of Great Britain, for example, has amounted to some $935,000,000 a year; but various local bodies spend also some $900,000,000 a year. Some of this is cross-spending, but the grand total amounts to some $1,500,000,000 a year.
Before writing or speaking of Germany it is well to know at least what Germany is. To pick up a hand-book and to quote therefrom the figures relating to the German Empire, as though these covered Germany, as is often done, is as accurate and helpful to the inquirer, as though one should take the figures of the New York clearing-house as accurate descriptions of the total and detailed business of all the New York banks and trust companies. A clearing-house is merely a piece of machinery for the adjustment of differences between a host of debtors and creditors. The comparative cost of the German army and navy can only be figured properly against the income and expenditure of the total wealth of all Germany. And all Germany is something more than the German Empire, which in certain respects is only a book-keeper, an adjuster of differences.
”Was ist des Deutschen Vaterland?
Ist's Preussenland? Ist's Schwabenland?
Ist's wo am Rhein die Rebe bluht?