Part 22 (1/2)
In 1909 England had 123,000 tons of wars.h.i.+ps in the Mediterranean and 427,000 tons in the North Sea.
In 1912 England had 126,000 tons of wars.h.i.+ps in the Mediterranean and 481,000 tons in the North Sea.
At last accounts England had 50,000 tons of war-s.h.i.+ps in the Mediterranean and 500,000 tons in the North Sea.
There has been a steady increase of the navy in Germany. In 1900 the tonnage of war-s.h.i.+ps and large cruisers over 5,000 tons was 152,000; in 1911 it was 823,000. The number of heavy guns in 1900 was 52; in 1911 it was 330. The horse-power of engines in 1900 was 160,000; in 1911 it was 1,051,000. The naval crews in 1900 numbered 28,326; in 1911, 57,353; and in 1913 the German naval personnel will consist of 3,394 officers and 69,495 men. Between 1900 and 1911 the tonnage of the British fleet increased from 215,000 to 1,716,000; of the German fleet from 152,000 to 829,000.
In ten years British naval expenditure has increased from $172,500,000 to $222,500,000; in Germany the expenditure has jumped from $47,500,000 to $110,000,000; in America the increase is from $80,000,000 to $132,500,000. Out of these total sums Great Britain spends one third, America one fifth, and Germany one half on new construction.
Germany has a navy league numbering over one million active and honorary members; a periodical, Die Flotte, published by the league with a circulation of over 400,000. This league not only educates but excites the whole nation by a vigorous campaign which never ceases. It takes its members on excursions to seaports to see the s.h.i.+ps; it holds exhibitions throughout the country with pictures and lecturers; it supports seamen's homes, and helps to equip boys wis.h.i.+ng to enter the navy; it lends its encouragement to the two school-s.h.i.+ps which are partly supported from public funds; it sees to it that war-s.h.i.+ps are named after provinces and cities, creating a friendly rivalry among them; and lately, out of its surplus funds, it has presented a gun-boat to the nation.
The leading spirit of this organization is Admiral von Tirpitz, at present the German secretary of the navy and probably the most dangerous mischief-maker in Europe. In addition to this work a campaign is waged in the press for the increase of the navy, in which a number of experts are engaged. I have been told by Germans who ought to know, but who deprecate this exciting campaigning, that the press is so largely influenced by Admiral von Tirpitz and his corps of press-agents and writers, that it is even difficult to procure the publication of a protest or a reply. Indeed, were it my habit to go into personal matters, I could offer ample proof of this contention, that the opponents of naval expansion are cleverly shut out of the press altogether.
Wilhelmshafen, the naval station on the North Sea, has been fortified till it is said to be impregnable; the same has been done for Heligoland, and the mouths of the Elbe and the Weser have also been strongly fortified. At Kiel are the naval technical school, an a.r.s.enal, and dry and floating docks, and the ca.n.a.l itself is being widened and deepened to meet the needs of the largest s.h.i.+ps of war.
When it is remembered that the beginnings of all this date back only to 1898, when the first navy bill was pa.s.sed through the Reichstag with much difficulty, and only after the Emperor and his ministers had brought every influence to bear upon the members, Germany is certainly to be congratulated upon her success. Nor is she to be blamed for remembering, and regretting, that the two most important harbors used by her trade are Antwerp and Rotterdam, the one in Belgium, the other in Holland.
The Kielerwoche, or Kiel Regatta, has grown from the sailing-matches of a few small yachts into one of the best-managed, most picturesque, and gayest yachting weeks in the world. Indeed, from the stand-point of hospitality, orderliness, imposing array of s.h.i.+pping, and good racing and friendliness to the stranger, I am not sure that it is equalled at either Newport or Cowes. Were I writing merely from my personal experience, I should declare unhesitatingly that it is the most splendid and best-managed picnic on the water that one can attend, and lovers of yachts and yachting should not fail to see it.
This Kielerwoche, too, has, and is intended to have, an influence in teaching the Germans to aid and abet their Emperor and his ministers in making Germany a great sea power.
When a nation for more than a hundred years has been quite comfortably safe from any fear of attack because she has been easily first in commerce, wealth, industry, and in sea power, it comes as a shock, even to a phlegmatic people, to learn that they are being rapidly overhauled commercially, financially, industrially, and as a fighting force on the sea; and all this within a few years.
England with her money subsidies, with her troops, and with her navy has heretofore provided against Continental aggression by the diplomatic philosophy of a balance of power. She has arranged her alliances with Continental powers so that no one of them could become a menace to herself. She did so against the Spain of Charles V, the France of Louis XIV, the France of Napoleon, the Russia of the late Czar, and now against the Germany of William II. The France of the great Napoleon, in attempting to complete the commercial isolation of England by compelling Russia to close her ports to her, buried herself in snow and ice on the way back from Moscow, and delivered herself up completely a little later at Waterloo. That was the nearest to success of any attempt to break through the doctrine of the balance of power.
In the year 800 A. D. the Catholic Church, which took over the Roman supremacy to translate it into a spiritual empire, accepted a German Emperor, Charlemagne, as her man-at-arms. One hundred and fifty years later she accepted still another, Otto I. This partners.h.i.+p was called the Holy Roman Empire. It has been noted, but is still misunderstood, that the difference between the Catholic Church before and after the Reformation was very marked. The Catholic Church claimed to be not only a system of belief but a system of government. Infallibility was to include secular as well as religious matters, and the church strove to rule as a secular emperor and as a spiritual tyrant. To-day Roman Catholicism is a sect, one among many; Roman Catholics themselves would be the last to consent to any temporal universal power.
The Protestants, too, were at first inclined to the methods of Rome.
Luther teaches intolerance, and Calvin burns a heretic and writes in favor of the doctrine: Jure gladii coercendos esse hereticos. The real reformation only came when we had reformed the reformers, but it was that spiritual and political legacy from Rome that the Teuton world, including ourselves, fought to nullify.
There was no successful revolt against this curious spiritual Caesarism until the son of a Saxon miner named Luther married out of monkdom, burnt the Pope's commands on a bonfire, and plunged all Europe first into a peasants' war, followed by a dividing of Europe between a Protestant union and a Catholic league, and then a thirty years' war, which destroyed two thirds of the population of what is now Germany. After three hundred years of disunion and hatreds, Prussia united their country by a cement of blood and iron, and in the last forty years has made out of her the most powerful nation on the continent of Europe.
It is only very lately that any of us have realized what has happened.
So little attention has been paid to the matter that there is no sufficient and worthy history of Germany in English. More than we realize, Germany is a new factor in politics, a new rival in commerce, a new knight in the tournament lists. This accounts, in no small degree, for the uneasiness Germany causes in the world.
Forty years ago Germany was known to a few students as having supplied us with music, mythology, and a certain amount of enchanting literature; scholars.h.i.+p along certain lines; and work in philosophy that a few in America and in England were studying. As a knight in s.h.i.+ning armor, demanding a place at the council-board of nations, and ready to resent any pa.s.sing over of her claims to recognition in the discussion and settlement of international politics, she is a newcomer.
One of the chief causes for the restlessness, particularly in England, the heart of the greatest empire in the world, is that this new-comer must be made room for at the table, received with courtesy, and consulted. Another individual has married into the family, and must gradually find her place there. Of all nations in the world, England is the slowest to make new friends and acquaintances, and easily the most awkward in doing so. She is a good friend when you know her, but with the most abominable manners to strangers.
The Englishman, for example, pops into his club to escape the world, not to seek it there. The English club and the English home are primarily for seclusion, not for companions.h.i.+p, and this characteristic alone is wofully hard for the stranger to understand.
To the gregarious German, priding himself upon Gemuthlichkeit, loving reunions, restaurants, his Stammtisch, formal and punctilious in his politeness, unused to the ways of the world, but yet convinced that he is now a great man politically and commercially, the Englishman is not only an enigma but an insult. I am criticising neither. I have received unbounded hospitality and friendliness from both. I have ridden, fought, drunk, travelled, and lived with both, but for that very reason I understand how horribly and continually they rub one another the wrong way.
In the fundamental matter of morals the German looks upon the Englishman as a hypocrite, and the Englishman looks upon the German as rather unpolished and undignified. Berlin is open all night, London closes at half-past twelve. The British Sunday is a gloomy suppression of vitality, touched up here and there with preaching and hymn-singing, and fringed with surrept.i.tious golf; the German Sunday is a national fair, with a blossoming of all kinds of amus.e.m.e.nts, deluged with beer, and attended by whole families as their only relaxation during the week.
The German licenses vice, lotteries, and gambling; the Englishman refuses to recognize the existence of any of the three. The German does not understand the Englishman's point of view in these matters, which is that, though he knows these things to exist, and that he is no better in actual practice than other men, he refuses to accept these as his ideal. He denounces and pa.s.ses judgment upon, and punishes men and women, who go too far in their appreciation and practice of apolausticism as a philosophy of life. He might have run away from danger himself, but he none the less scorns the man who did so. The s.h.i.+pwreck, the fire, the test of moral courage and endurance, may have found him a coward, or weak, or a deserter, but he holds that he must none the less measure the coward, the weakling, and the deserter, not by his own possible weakness if put to the same tests, but by his ideal of a courageous and straightforward Englishman. I agree with him wholly and heartily. If our sympathy is to go out on every occasion, to the man who failed to come up to the mark of n.o.ble manhood, just because we feel that we might under like circ.u.mstances have failed too, then we give up the code of honor altogether, and our ideals droop to the level from which we fight and pray to be preserved.
We pa.s.s judgment upon the coward, upon the failure, upon the man who has not mastered his life and life itself, unhesitatingly. It is hard to do, it looks as though one were without pity and without sympathy.
Not so; it is because we have great sympathy, and I hope unending pity, and a growing charity, and constant willingness to lend a hand; but to condone failure is to commit the selfish and unpardonable cowardice of not judging another that you may not be forced to judge yourself too harshly. That is far from being hypocrisy. Indeed, in these days it is one of the hardest things to do, so fast are we levelling down socially and politically and even morally. It looks like an a.s.sumption of superiority when, G.o.d knows, it is only a timorous attempt on our part not to lose our grip on the ideals that help to keep us out of the dust and the mud. But he who lets others off lightly in order that he may not be thought to have too high a standard himself, or because he fears that he may one day fail himself, such a one is the coward of cowards, the candidate for the lowest place in h.e.l.l; and well he deserves it, for he helps to lower the standard of manhood, and he tarnishes the s.h.i.+eld of honor of the whole race. Let them call us hypocrites till they strangle doing so, for when we lower our standards because we fear that we cannot live up to them ourselves, all will be lost. To be mild with other men, because we distrust ourselves, is a poisonous sympathy that rots away the life of him who receives it, and of him who gives it, and ends in a s...o...b..ring charity which must finally protect itself by tyranny and cruelty. Not infrequently in dealing with individuals and with subject nations it is senseless cruelty to be over-kind.
This sneer of Saxon hypocrisy, of ”Perfide Albion,” is seldom explained to other people by men of our race, and we Americans and Englishmen have taken little pains to make it clear. We should not be surprised, therefore, if we are misunderstood. We have been easily first so long that we have neglected the explanation or the defence of ourselves to others.