CHAPTER V THE STATECRAFT OF A PRIESTHOOD

The thoroughness and efficiency of the Germans are admitted even by hostile critics. In the practical sphere they have excelled in military preparations, in the encouragement of industry, and in the organisation of finance. But they have achieved an even more remarkable success than any of these; for they have so arranged their educational system that it is drilled hardly less admirably than their army.[1] From the primary schools to the universities everything is ordered, so that the plastic mind of youth is forced into a political mould which suits the purposes of government. Patriotism of the pattern approved by the authorities is inculcated directly or indirectly in every class-room. While thought is left ostentatiously free in regard to private morals and religious foundations, the duties of the citizen to the state, the duties of the state to posterity, the relations of Germany to the outside world, are subjects upon which independent speculation is not tolerated.

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Even schoolmasters and professors have their ambitions; but unless they contribute their quota to the support of imperial ideals, their careers are unlikely to prosper. It is not enough that a lecturer should not run counter to state policy; he must actively promote its ends before he can hope to be transferred to a sphere of greater dignity and influence. Pedagogy is a branch of the Civil Service just as much as the Treasury or the Public Health Department. Teachers from the lowest to the highest grades are the stipendiaries of the bureaucracy. If they render useful services they are promoted. If they fail to render useful services they are passed over. If they indulge in dangerous speculations they are sent adrift. Not merely the army, but the whole German nation, is disciplined, during the period of its impressionable youth, with the object of inclining its mind to support state policy through thick and thin.

The schools feed the universities; the universities feed the press, the learned professions, and the higher grades in industry and finance. Private conversation, as well as what is published in newspapers, magazines, and books, bears the impress of the official mint to a degree unthinkable in England or America, Russia or France. Theories of politics are devised by ingenious sophists, exactly as the machinery at Essen is contrived by engineers—for the express purpose of forwarding Prussian policy. History is twisted and distorted in order to prepare the way for imperial ambitions by justifying them in advance.

It is a signal triumph for the thoroughness of German methods that all the thinkers, dreamers, {129} poets, and prophets, with but a few exceptions, should have been commandeered and set to work thinking, dreaming, poetising, and prophesying to the glory of the Kaiser, and his army, and his navy, and his counsellors, and his world policy, and the conquests and expansion which are entailed therein.

MOBILISATION OF INTELLECTUALS

It is somewhat startling, however, to find the intellectuals thus mobilised, and all but unanimous, on the official side; for hitherto in history they have rarely agreed among themselves, and the greater part have usually favoured the Opposition rather than the Government. Nor does this close alliance between learning and the bureaucracy seem altogether satisfactory. For thought loses its fine edge when it is set to cut millstones of state. It loses its fine temper in the red heat of political controversy. By turning utilitarian it ceases to be universal; and what is perhaps even worse, it ceases to be free. It tends more and more to become the mere inventor of things which will sell at a profit; less and less the discoverer of high principles which the gods have hidden out of sight. It would hardly be possible to imagine a more complete reversal of attitude than that which has occurred in Germany between the beginning of the nineteenth century and the present time; and though this change may serve admirably the immediate purposes of the state, it does not augur well for the future of German thought.

The similarities and contrasts of history are interesting to contemplate. In the ferment of thought and action which occurred in France during the generation preceding the battle of Valmy, and that other which has been going on in Germany in the {130} generation preceding the battle of the Marne, there are various likenesses and unlikenesses. In France before the Revolution, as in Germany to-day, a bureaucracy, responsible solely to the monarch, directed policy and controlled administration. But in France this bureaucracy was incompetent, unpractical, and corrupt. Its machinery was clogged with dead matter of every kind, with prejudices, traditions, and statutes, many of which had outlived their original purposes. The Struldbrugs, discovered by Gulliver during his voyages, were a race of men whose mortal souls were incased in immortal bodies. The French monarchy was of this nature, and the soul of it was long since dead. Inefficiency was everywhere apparent; and, as a natural consequence, the whole system had become a butt, at which each brilliant writer in turn levelled his darts of derision and contempt.

In Germany, although the political mechanism is the same, the conditions are diametrically the opposite. The bureaucracy and the monarchy which it supports, have proved themselves highly efficient and adaptive. The arrangement has worked with a marvellous success. It has cherished the material, if not the spiritual, well-being of the people. The wealth-producing and belly-filling activities of the race have been stimulated to an extent never yet attained by any form of government, either popular or despotic. Administration has been honest, thrifty, and singularly free from the usual dull negatives of officialdom and the pedantries of red tape. In all directions industrial prosperity has increased, under the fostering care of the state, by leaps and bounds. Anything more remote from the bankrupt empire of {131} Louis XVI. it would be impossible to conceive. And as a natural consequence, brilliant German writers have for the most part[2] spent their forces of rhetoric and fancy in idealising the grandeur and nobility of an order of things, under which resources, comfort, and luxury have expanded with such amazing strides.

IDEAS OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION

In the case of France the aim of the intellectuals was to pull down existing institutions, in that of Germany it has been to bolster them up, to extend and develop them to their logical conclusions. But the second were no less agents of destruction than the first. Each alike, as a condition of success, required that a new order of moral and political ideas should be set up; each attained a certain measure of success; and the results which followed were those which usually follow, when new wine is poured into old bottles.

The ideas of the French Revolution cast themselves into the mould of republicanism. A picture wholly imaginary and fictitious was drawn of the institutions of Greece and Rome in ancient days. Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity were believed to have been the foundations of these famous states. Patriots on the banks of the Seine conceived themselves to be re-incarnations of Aristides and the Gracchi, of Pericles, of one Brutus or the other—it mattered little which. Political idealism passed rapidly into a kind of religious fervour.

The German masquerade is very different from this, but it is no less a masquerade. What covers the new faith, indeed, is not plumage borrowed from the Greeks and Romans, but habiliments which are supposed to have clad the heroic forms of ancestral Teutons. The student on his way to doctor's degree—the {132} intelligent clerk scanning the high-road to fortune from the eminence of office-stool—dream in their pensive leisure to emulate the heroes of Asgard, to merit and enjoy the glories of Valhalla. But the noble shapes and gorgeous colourings in which the modern young German of honest, sober, and industrious character has chosen to see his destiny prefigured, are no less imaginary and fictitious than those others, with which eloquent notaries'-clerks, and emancipated, unfrocked priests, decked themselves out for the admiration of the Paris mob. In Germany as in France political idealism passed into a kind of religious fervour, which inspired men to a mimicry of old-Wardour-Street shams, and led them to neglect the development of their own true natures.


During quiet times that stream of events, which we are wont to call human progress, is occupied incessantly in throwing up dams, of one sort or another, throughout the world. Tree-trunks and logs, which have been swept down by former floods of conquest and invasion, jam at some convenient rocky angle, as the river falls to its normal level. Against these obstacles the drift and silt of habit, custom, law, convention, prejudice, and tradition slowly collect, settle, and consolidate. An embankment is gradually formed, and the waters are held up behind it ever higher and higher. The tribal pool becomes a pond or nation; and this again, if conditions remain favourable—for so long, that is to say, as there are no more raging and destructive floods,—extends into a lake or inland sea of empire.... "See," cry the optimists, "see what a fine, smooth, silvery sheet of civilisation, culture, wealth, happiness, comfort, and {133} what not besides, where formerly there was but an insignificant torrent brawling in the gorge!" ... But the pessimists, as is their nature, shake their heads, talk anxiously of the weight of waters which are banking up behind, and of the unreliable character of the materials out of which the dam has grown. "Some day," they warn us, "the embankment will burst under the heavy pressure; or, more likely still, some ignorant, heedless, or malicious person will begin to fiddle and tamper with the casual structure; and then what may we expect?"

RECENT ANXIETIES

There has been considerable nervousness of late among rulers of nations as to the soundness of their existing barrages. For the most part, however, they have concerned themselves with internal dangers—with watching propagandists of the socialist persuasion—with keeping these under a kind of benevolent police supervision, and in removing ostentatiously from time to time the more glaring of their alleged grievances. This procedure has been quite as noticeable in the case of autocracies, as in countries which enjoy popular institutions.

Treitschke and Bernhardi—even Nietzsche himself—valued themselves far more highly as builders-up than as pullers-down. It is always so with your inspired inaugurators of change. It was so with Rousseau and those other writers, whose thoughts, fermenting for a generation in the minds of Frenchmen, brought about the Revolution. The intellectuals of the eighteenth century, like those of the nineteenth, aimed at getting rid of a great accumulation of insanitary rubbish. But this was only a troublesome preliminary, to be hurried through with as quickly as possible, in order that the much greater {134} work of construction might proceed upon the cleared site.

Treitschke made a hole in the German dam when he cut an ancient commonplace in two, and tore out the one half of it. Nietzsche turned the hole into a much vaster cavity by pulling out the other half. Bernhardi and the pedantocracy worked lustily at the business, with the result that a great part of the sticks, stones, and mud of tradition are now dancing, rumbling, and boiling famously in the flood. Whether they have injured our dam as well as their own, we are hardly as yet in a position to judge.

The profounder spirit of Nietzsche realised clearly enough the absurdity of supposing that the conflicting beliefs and aspirations of mankind could all be settled and squared in a few bustling decades—that the contradictions, paradoxes, and antinomies of national existence could be written off with a few bold strokes of the sword, and the world started off on the road to perfection, like a brisk debtor who has purged his insolvency in the Bankruptcy Court. But the enthusiasm of Treitschke and Bernhardi made them blind to these considerations. Had not the formula been discovered, which would overcome every obstacle—that stroke of genius, the famous bisection of the commonplace? For private conduct, the Sermon on the Mount; for high statecraft, Machiavelli's Prince! Was ever anything simpler, except perhaps the way of Columbus with the egg?


When we push our examination further, into the means which Germany has been urged by her great thinkers to employ in preparing for this premeditated war, for provoking it when the season should be ripe, {135} and for securing victory and spoils, we are struck more than ever by the gulf which separates the ideas of the German pedantocracy from those of the rest of the world. Nor can we fail to be impressed by the matter-of-fact and businesslike way in which the military and civil powers have set to work to translate those notions into practice.

A POLITICAL PRIESTHOOD

No kind of priesthood has ever yet exercised a great and direct influence upon national policy without producing calamity. And by an ill fate, it has always been the nature of these spiritual guides to clutch at political power whenever it has come within their reach.

Of all classes in the community who are intellectually capable of having ideas upon public affairs, a priesthood—or what is the same thing, a pedantocracy—is undoubtedly the most mischievous, if it succeeds in obtaining power. It matters not a whit whether they thunder forth their edicts and incitements from church pulpits or university chairs, whether they carry their sophistical projects up the back stairs of Catholic King or Lutheran Kaiser, whether, having shaved their heads and assumed vows of celibacy, they dwell in ancient cloisters, or, having taken unto themselves wives and begotten children, they keep house in commonplace villa residences. None of these differences is essential, or much worth considering. The one class is as much a priesthood as the other, and the evils which proceed from the predominance of the one, and the other, are hardly distinguishable.

They stand ostentatiously aloof from the sordid competitions of worldly business. They have forsworn, or at any rate forgone, the ordinary prizes of {136} wealth and position. And for these very reasons they are ill equipped for guiding practical affairs. Their abstinences are fatal impediments, and render them apt to leave human nature out of their reckoning. They are wanting in experience of the difficulties which beset ordinary men, and of the motives which influence them. Knowing less of such matters (for all their book learning) than any other class of articulately-speaking men, they find it by so much the easier to lay down rules and regulations for the government of the world.

To a priesthood, whether ecclesiastical or academic, problems of politics and war present themselves for consideration in an engaging simplicity. They evolve theories of how people live, of how they ought to live; and both sets of theories are mainly cobwebs. There is no place in their philosophy for anything which is illogical or untidy. Ideas of compromise and give-and-take, are abominations in priestly eyes—at any rate when they are engaged in contemplation of worldly affairs. And seeing that the priesthood aspires, nevertheless, to govern and direct a world which is illogical and needs humouring, there is nothing wonderful, if when it has achieved power, it should blunder on disaster in the name of principle, and incite men to cruelties in the name of humanity. 'Clericalism,' said a French statesman, and English statesmen have echoed his words—'Clericalism is the enemy.' And this is right, whether the priesthood be that of Rome or John Calvin, of economic professors expounding Adam Smith in the interests of Manchester, or history professors improving upon Treitschke in the interests of the Hohenzollern dynasty.

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PRIESTS AND LAWYERS

Priests and professors when they meddle in politics are always the same. They sit in their studies or cells, inventing fundamental principles; building thereon great edifices of reasoned or sentimental brickwork which splits in the sun and crumbles in the storm. Throughout the ages, as often as they have left their proper sphere, they have been subject to the same angry enthusiasms and savage obstinacies. Their errors of judgment have been comparable only to their arrogance. Acts of cruelty and treachery, meanness and dishonour,[3] which would revolt the ordinary German or Englishman, commend themselves readily, on grounds of sophistry or logic, to these morbid ascetics, so soon as they begin busying themselves with the direction of public affairs.

It would be unfair to judge any country by its political professors. At the same time, if any country is so foolish as to follow such guides, there is a probability of mischief in national—still more in international—affairs. For they are as innocent as the lawyers themselves, of any knowledge of the real insides of things. They differ of course from the lawyers in many ways. They are ever for making changes for the sake of symmetry; while the man of law is for keeping as he is until the last moment; or at any rate until it is clearly his interest to budge. A priesthood has a burning faith in its own hand-wrought idols; the lawyer on the contrary, does not go readily to the stake, does not catch fire easily, being rather of the nature of asbestos. When lawyers monopolise political power—even when they merely {138} preponderate, as of late years they have seemed to do more and more in all democratic countries, whether of the monarchical or republican type—they invariably destroy by insensible gradations that which is most worth preserving in man or state, the soul. But they do not bring on sudden catastrophe as a priesthood does; their method is to strangle slowly like ivy.

In England, nowadays—indeed ever since the 'eighties, when professors of Political Economy became discredited as political guides—there are not many evidences of priestly influence. Certainly there is nothing of an organised kind. What exists is erratic and incalculable. There is much clamour; but it is contradictory, spasmodic, and inconstant, without any serious pretence, either of learning or science, to support it. Each of our prophets is in business for himself. There is no tinge of Erastianism about any of them. For the most part they are the grotesques and lions comiques of the world of letters, who prophesy standing on their heads, or grinning through horse-collars, and mistaking always "the twinkling of their own sophisticated minds for wisdom."

Alliance between a priesthood and a bureaucracy tends gradually to produce, as in the case of China, an oppressive uniformity—not unlike that aimed at by the more advanced socialists—where every fresh innovation is a restriction hampering the natural bent. On the other hand an alliance between a priesthood and a military caste—especially when the bureaucracy is ready to act in sympathy—is one of the commonest causes of international convulsions.

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PRIESTS AND SOLDIERS

Oddly enough, the soldier, who affects to despise men of words and make-believes, and who on this account has an instinctive dislike and distrust of the lawyer—so violent indeed that it often puts him in the wrong, and leaves him at the mercy of the object of his contempt—is dangerously apt to become the tool of anything which bears a likeness to Peter the Hermit. It is not really the lawyer's confidence in the efficacy of words which revolts the soldier, nearly so much as the kind of words used, the temperament of him who uses them, and the character of the make-believes which it is sought to establish. The unworldliness, simplicity, idealism, and fervour of the priesthood make strong appeals to a military caste, which on the contrary is repelled by what it conceives to be the cynicism, opportunism, and self-seeking of lawyer statecraft.

More especially is it difficult for the military caste to resist the influence of the priesthood when, as in Germany of recent years, they have insisted upon giving the warrior the most important niche in their temple, and on burning incense before him day and night. Working industriously in their studies and laboratories they have found moral justification for every course, however repugnant to established ideas, which may conceivably make it easier to attain victory and conquest. The soldier might have scruples about doing this or that; but when he is assured by inspired intellectuals, that what would best serve his military ends is also the most moral course of action, how can he—being a man of simple mind—presume to doubt it; though he may occasionally shudder as he proceeds to put it into execution?

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German thoroughness is an admirable quality, but even thoroughness may be carried to extremes which are absurd, or something worse.

No nation has a right to complain if another chooses to drill armies, build fleets, accumulate stores of treasure, weapons, and material; nor is it incumbent upon any nation to wear its heart upon its sleeve, or to let the whole world into its secrets, military or political. In so far as Germany has acted upon these principles she was well within her rights. As a result we have suffered heavily; but we must blame ourselves for being ill-prepared; we have no justification for complaining because Germany was well-prepared.

There are some kinds of preparation, however, which it does not seem possible to justify, if the world is to consist as heretofore of a large number of independent states, between whose citizens it is desirable to maintain a certain friendliness and freedom of intercourse. German activities in various directions, for many years before war broke out, make one wonder what state of things was contemplated by German statesmen, as likely to prevail when war should be over. What, for instance, is to be the status of Germans visiting or residing in other countries—seeking to trade with them—to borrow money from them—to interchange with them the civilities of ordinary life, or those more solemn courtesies which are practised by societies of learning and letters? Will the announcement civis Germanicus sum be enough henceforth to secure the stranger a warm welcome and respect? Or will such revelation of his origin be more likely to lead to his speedy re-embarkation for the land of his nativity?

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GERMAN AGENCIES

Spying has always been practised since the beginning of time; but it has rarely been conducted in such a manner as to produce general uneasiness, or any sensible restraint upon private relations. Logically, it would be unfair to condemn recent German enterprises in this direction, seeing that she has only extended an accepted nuisance on to a much vaster scale. But here again logic is a misleading guide. There is something in the very scale of German espionage which has changed the nature of this institution. It has grown into a huge organised industry for the debauching of vain, weak, and greedy natures; for turning such men—for the most part without their being aware of it—into German agents. The result of Teutonic thoroughness in this instance is a domestic intrusion which is odious, as well as a national menace which cannot be disregarded. Many of these hostile agencies may surely be termed treacherous, seeing that they have aimed, under the guise of friendly intercourse, at forwarding schemes of invasion and conquest.

We are familiar enough with the vain purse-proud fellow, who on the strength of a few civil speeches from the Kaiser—breathing friendship and the love of peace—has thenceforward flattered himself that his mission in life was to eradicate suspicion of German intentions from the minds of his British fellow-countrymen. This is the unconscious type of agent, useful especially in sophisticated circles, and among our more advanced politicians of anti-militarist sympathies.

Then we have the naturalised, or unnaturalised, magnate of finance or industry, to whom business prosperity is the great reality of life, politics and {142} patriotism being by comparison merely things of the illusory sort. It would cause him no very bitter anguish of heart to see England humiliated and her Empire dissolved, providing his own cosmopolitan undertakings continued to thrive undisturbed by horrid war. He, also, has very likely been the recipient of imperial suavities. In addition to this, however, he has been encouraged to imagine that he enjoys in a peculiar degree the confidence of the German Foreign Office. The difficulties which so shrewd a fellow must have in believing in the innocence of German intentions must be considerable at the outset; but they are worn away by the constant erosion of his private interests. Britain must not cross Germany:—that is his creed in a nutshell. This is the semi-conscious type of agent; and he carries great weight in business circles, and even sometimes in circles much higher than those frequented by the money-changers.

We may resent such influences as these, now that we have become more or less sensible of the effect which they have had during recent years in hindering our preparations for defence; but here we cannot fairly charge Germany with any breach of custom and tradition. We must blame ourselves for having given heed to their counsellors. But it is different when we come to such things as the wholesale corruption of the subjects of friendly nations—a network of careful intrigue for the promotion of rebellion—lavish subsidies and incitements for the purpose of fostering Indian unrest, Egyptian discontent, and South African treason—the supply of weapons and munitions of war on the shortest notice, and most favourable terms, to any one and every one who {143} seems inclined to engage in civil war in Ireland or elsewhere.

GERMAN METHODS AT WORK

The whole of this procedure has been justified in advance and advocated in detail by Bernhardi and the priesthood. Belgium, France, Russia, and Britain are doubtless peculiarly alive to the iniquity of these practices, for the reason that their moral judgment has been sharpened by personal suffering. But they do not denounce the system solely because they themselves have been injured by it, but also because it seems to them to be totally at variance with all recent notions regarding the comity of nations. If we may use such an old-fashioned term, it appears to us to be wrong.

If methods such as these are henceforth to be practised by the world in general, must not all international communion become impossible, as much in time of peace as during a war? Indeed must not human existence itself become almost intolerable? Friendliness, hospitality, courtesies of every sort, between men and women of one country and those of another, must cease absolutely, if the world should become a convert to these German doctrines. Travel must cease; for no one likes to be stripped naked and searched at every frontier. Trade and financial operations must also be restricted, one would imagine, to such an extent that ultimately they will wither and die.

And if the world in general after the war is ended does not become a convert to these German doctrines of treacherous preparation, made in friendly territories during time of peace, what then will be its attitude towards Germany and the Germans; for they presumably have no intention of abandoning these {144} practices? It is an unpleasant problem, but it will have to be faced sooner or later.

For obviously, although every sensible man believes, and many of us know by actual experience, that the instincts of Germans, in all private relations, are as loyal and honourable as those of most other races which inhabit the earth, no nation can afford any longer to have dealings with them on equal terms, if they have decided to allow their instincts to be used and abused, over-ridden and perverted, by a bureaucracy whose ideal is thoroughness, and by a priesthood which has invented a new system of morals to serve a particular set of ends. Not only the allied nations which are at present at war with Germany, but any country whose interests may conceivably, at any future time, come into conflict with those of that far-sighted empire, will be forced in self-defence to take due precautions. It is clear enough that more efficacious means than mere scraps of naturalisation paper will be needed to secure mankind against the abuse of its hospitality by Teutonic theorists.

THE GERMAN CREED

The whole of this strange system, those methods which, even after somewhat painful experience of their effects, we are still inclined in our less reflective moments to regard as utterly incredible—is it possible to summarise them in a few sentences? What are the accepted maxims, the orthodox formulas of Prussian statecraft?

Power, more power, world-power; these according to German theory, as well as practice, should be the dominant principles of the state.

When a nation desires territories belonging to its neighbours, let it take them, if it is strong enough. {145} No further justification is needed than mere appetite for possession, and the strength to satisfy it.

War is in itself a good thing and not a bad. Like a purge, or a course of the waters of Aix, it should be taken, every half-century or so, by all nations which aim at preserving the vigour of their constitutions.

During the intervening periods the chief duty of the state is to prepare for war, so that when it comes, victory, and with it benefits of the material, as well as of the spiritual sort, may be secured.

No means which will help to secure victory are immoral, whether in the years preceding the outbreak of hostilities, or afterwards, when the war is in full course. If the state, aided by its men of science, could find any safe and secret means of sending a plague, as an advance guard, to ravage the enemy, where is the objection? The soul of a Prussian soldier might revolt against this form of warfare, but at what point would it conflict with the teachings of the priesthood? Nor can we imagine, were the thing possible, that the bureaucracy would allow itself to be hampered by any scruples.

As to the declaration of war, let it be made when the state is in a strong position and its prey in a weak one. This is the all-important consideration. The actual pretext is only a secondary matter, though worthy of attention for the effect it may have on the action of neutrals. And as war is a game of chance, it is wise and right to 'correct fortune,' so far as this can be accomplished during years of peace and under the cloak of amity, by the aid of spies, secret agents, accomplices, traitors, rebels, and what not besides.

The state which has evolved this system and laid {146} down these rules, without the least attempt at secrecy or concealment, is the most efficient machine of the fighting and administrative kind at present existing in the world—perhaps which has ever existed in the world. But as you increase the size, power, and complexity of a machine there are obvious dangers unless you can also increase the calibre of the men who have to drive and direct it. This is a much more difficult problem than the other; and there is no evidence to show that it has been solved in the case of Germany. The more powerful the machine, the greater is apt to be the disaster if it is mishandled.

In history the blunders of bureaucracy are a by-word. They have been great and many, even when, as in Germany to-day, the bureaucracy is in the full vigour of its age, and in the first flower of uprightness; for a bureaucracy, in order to retain its efficiency, must remain incorruptible, and that is one of the hardest things to secure.

As for the priesthoods, if they are to be of any use, their faith must burn brightly. And the faith of a priesthood is very apt to burn itself out—very apt also to set fire to other things during the process; even to the edifice of popular virtue and the imperial purple itself, which things—unlike the Phoenix, the Salamander, and the Saint—are none the better or stronger for being burned.


We are constantly being told by high authorities that the moral objective of the present war is 'to put down militarism,' and 'abolish it' off the face of the earth. There are few of us who do not wish that this aim may be crowned with success; but militarism is a tough weed to kill, and something {147} more than the mere mowing of it down by some outside scythesman will be necessary, one imagines, in order to get rid of it.

MAIN OBJECT OF THE WAR

The true moral objective of the war is something much more important than this. A blacker evil than militarism is that violation of private trust and public honour which is known as the Prussian System, and which has recently been 'marching through rapine, to the disintegration,' not of a single nation, or group of nations, but of the whole fabric of human society, including its own. It is an elaborate contrivance of extreme artificiality, a strange perversion of the nature of man. These are its inherent weaknesses; and fortunately, by reason of them, it is more vulnerable to hard blows than militarism which, with all its vices, and extravagancies, is rooted in instincts which are neither depraved nor ignoble.

Militarism might continue to thrive under adversity, and after the heaviest defeat, as it has done in times past; but the life of the Prussian System—that joint invention of the most efficient bureaucracy in the world, and of a priesthood whose industry can only be matched by its sycophancy and conceit—hangs upon the thread of success. Like the South Sea Bubble, or any of those other impostures of the financial sort, which have temporarily beguiled the confidence of mankind, it must collapse utterly under the shock of failure. It depends entirely on credit, and its powers of recuperation are nil. When its assets are disclosed, the characters of its promoters will be understood. The need, therefore, is to bring it at all costs to a complete demonstration of failure.

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We have been urged by our own anti-militarists not to inflict suffering and humiliation on Germany. But this is not a matter of the slightest importance one way or the other. It has but little to do with the issue which it is our business to settle, if we have the good fortune to come out victorious from the present struggle. To set up the suffering and humiliation of Germany as the object of high policy would cover the Allies with contempt; but to shrink from such things, if they should happen to stand between the Allies and the utter moral bankruptcy of the Prussian System, would overwhelm them with a burden far heavier and more shameful than contempt.


[1] "We may declare that the problem of training in arms and turning to real account the energies of the nation was first undertaken in thorough earnestness by Germany. We possess in our army a characteristic, necessary continuation of the school-system. For many men there is no better means of training; for them drilling, compulsory cleanliness, and severe discipline are physically and morally indispensable in a time like ours, which unchains all spirits."—Treitschke, Selections, pp. 106-107.

[2] Nietzsche is one of the rare exceptions.

[3] Cf. Professor Kuno Meyer, Times, December 24, 1914, and March 8, 1915.