IV

INSTITUTIONS AND CHARACTER

As a rule, I call a spade a spade.  When I mean The Times, I say The Times, and I condemn the old-fashioned twaddle of talking about “a morning contemporary.”  But to-day I depart from my rule and content myself with saying that I lately read in an important newspaper a letter dealing with Mr. Asquith’s distinction between “Prussian Militarism” and “German Democracy.”  For my own part, I did not think that distinction very sound.  The experience of the last three years has led me to the conclusion that the German democracy is to the full as bellicose as the military caste, and that it has in no way dissociated itself from the abominable crimes against decency and humanity which the military caste has committed.  I hold that the German people, as we know it to-day, is brutalized; but when one thus frames an indictment against a whole nation, one is bound to ask oneself what it is that has produced so calamitous a result.  How can a whole nation go wrong?  Has any race a “double dose of original sin”?  I do not believe it.  Human nature as it leaves the Creator’s hand is pretty much the same everywhere; and when we see it deformed and degraded, we must look for the influence which has been its bane.  In dealing with individuals the enquiry is comparatively simple, and the answer not far to seek.  But when we deal with nations we cannot, as a rule; point to a single figure, or even a group of figures, and say, “He, or they, did the mischief.”  We are forced to look wider and deeper, and we shall be well advised if we learn from Burke to realize “the mastery of laws, institutions, and government over the character and happiness of man.”  Let me apply Burke’s teaching to the case before us.

The writer of the letter which I am discussing has a whole-hearted dislike of the Germans, and especially of the Prussians; charges them with “cruelty, brutal arrogance, deceit, cunning, manners and customs below those of savages”; includes in the indictment professors, commercial men, and women; recites the hideous list of crimes committed during the present war; and roundly says that, however you label him, “the Prussian will always remain a beast.”

I dispute none of these propositions.  I believe them to be sadly and bitterly true; but if I am to follow Burke’s counsel, I must enquire into the “laws, institutions, and government” which have prevailed in Germany, and which have exercised so disastrous a “mastery over the character and happiness of man.”  In this enquiry it would be obvious to touch military ascendency, despotic monarchy, representative institutions deprived of effective power, administration made omnipotent, and bureaucratic interference with every detail of human life.  Sydney Smith’s words about unreformed England apply perfectly to modern Germany.  “Of all ingenious instruments of despotism I most commend a popular assembly where the majority are paid and hired, and a few bold and able men, by their brave speeches, make the people believe they are free.”