Art. 3.-THE GERMAN SPIRIT.

THE present war is a conflict, which admits no truce or reconciliation, between two conceptions and ideals of life. Liberty, democracy, and the moral law, are ranged in battle order against physical force, militarism, and the claims for universal domination.

The German spirit, once idealistic and humanitarian, has developed into the opposite of itself. Heine could reasonably describe the Germans as 'a speculative people, Ideologues, thinking backwards and forwards, dreamers who only live in the past or the future, and have no present.' But no longer do they willingly see in Hamlet, the dreamer who would be a man of action if only he could cease to think and ponder, their own national type and image. The successful wars of 1864, 1866, and 1870-1, and the notable expansion of German commerce, have intervened. Faust, however, still remains the acknowledged symbol and mirror of their mind and character. Two souls, alas! reside within my breast, and each withdraws from, and repels, its brother.' It is the purpose of the following pages to show that Germany, instead of harmonising its divergent tendencies, as is sometimes claimed, has made an unholy alliance between its idealism and its realism. The ideals of the Germans have come to be brutal and material; their lust of practical power is based upon those vain hopes, vain aims, inordinate desires, blown up with high conceits, engendering pride,' which, according to Milton, are the motives of the apostate angel.

The conspicuous institutions of Germany are the school and the barrack. The one is the complement of the other. From the universities proceed that love of country and firm belief in its future destiny, which have permeated all classes. The professor, and above all the professor of history, enjoys an influence to a degree unknown elsewhere. Niebuhr already, and Ranke, had advocated the claims of Prussia to the hegemony of the German-speaking states. After 1850, Sybel, Mommsen, Häusser, Droysen, Giesebrecht, all writing from the Prussian point of view, fostered patriotism to the height. And they were self-proclaimed realists, applying to

history and politics the methods of natural science. They anticipated Darwin in promulgating the doctrines of the struggle for existence and the survival of the fittest; or rather, they accepted as supreme those laws of nature which Darwin himself subordinated to the play of moral qualities in the human sphere.

Of these historians, Treitschke was the last and most notorious. Germany is the work of Prussia; Prussia of its army; and its army of its kings. That was his theme. Ruskin indeed, studying the history of these kings in Carlyle's account of the predecessors of Frederick the Great, was troubled by 'continually increasing doubt how far the machinery and discipline of war, under which they learnt the art of government, was essential for such lesson.' Even so far back as 1645, at the Conference of Münster, the Swedish ambassador felt constrained to describe with bitter and accurate irony the philosophy of the Hohenzollern family. 'God speaks no longer to princes by prophets and dreams; there is a divine calling wherever there is a favourable opportunity to attack a neighbour and extend one's own frontiers.' But Treitschke, misapplying his Darwinism, is spared all scruple. The historical rôle of Prussia began in the days when this Power incorporated, one after the other, the German states for which the hour of death had sounded.' He was ever ready with his triumphant chant of Vae Victis: woe to the weak, unfitted to survive. 'Pure and impartial history could never suit a proud and warlike nation.' And his voice, if of the loudest, was but one among many. David Friedrich Strauss, politician, Hegelian, author of the 'Leben Jesu,' declared that Prussia never made any but 'holy' wars-holy, since the unity of Germany was due to them. The war of 1870 was 'a work of public salubrity accomplished by Germany, France being rotten to the marrow.' All nations are rotten to the marrow who stand in the way of Prussia, or cast a shadow upon Germany's rightful place in the sun.'

Jena and Sedan, the crushing defeat or the crowning victory-Prussian history pivots on these. But for the disaster of Jena, Prussia could not have achieved the triumph of Sedan, could not have stood forth the appointed instrument to fulfil the historical mission' of Germanism. To further this mission, Prussian hegemony

in Germany was necessary; and Prussian hegemony could only be established by war. Didon, studying in the German universities at the beginning of the 'eighties, found it universally accepted that 'German unity could not have been accomplished without force and violence; it implied on the part of Prussia that policy of ruse and audacity consisting in the skilful preparation for conflict, in playing the part of the offended one, and in risking the future in a game of dice with victory.' Sedan or Jena, in this present war? Downfall, or WorldPower?' asks Bernhardi, Treitschke's military disciple, ready, along with his nation, for that policy of adventure, of gambling risk, which Nietzsche advocated as a chief law of conduct.

War is the sum of German realism, German policy is the reflex of what occurs in the animal kingdom. The philosophical historians and their military followers celebrate the happy necessity of war with deepest fervour. They re-echo the old Greek philosopher, with his war is the father of all things,' and Hobbes, who discovered the natural law to be 'the war of every man against every mana law that was regulated by 'kings and persons of sovereign authority,' who are 'in the state and posture of gladiators' and 'uphold thereby the industry of their subjects.' The Industrial period, which is supposed, by merely trading nations, to have superseded the period of Militarism, is nothing but a state of war, barely latent. War itself is a form of industry, bringing profit.

'The one unpardonable sin,' according to Treitschke, is the failure to use one's might.'

'Troops always ready to act,' said Frederick, the archmodel of the House of Hohenzollern, 'my war-chest well filled, and the vivacity of my character, were my reasons for making war against Marie Therèse, Queen of Bohemia and Hungary. Ambition, interest, the desire of making a name, carried the day with me, and I determined on war.'

He could refute Machiavelli before he became master of the State, and practise his doctrine afterwards. The first principle of realistic politics is that there are no principles, except those of self-interest. There are only opportunities, and these are fugitive. He is the best diplomatist who watches for the fit occasion to attack.

War! war! The living God (says Treitschke) will take care that war shall always return as a frightful medicine for the human race.' War,' says Marshal von der Goltz, is the right education of the people, and the true centre of national culture.' Should Germany not be sound, then 'war,' says Treitschke, 'is the sole remedy.' Should there be any internal difficulties in the German Empire (such as the increasing power of the Social Democrats), then a people that wishes to maintain its equilibrium must stir itself up from time to time by war.' Roon declared that 'the question of the Duchies (Schleswig-Holstein) is not a question of right, but a question of might; and we have the might.' 'To the end of time,' says Treitschke, 'weapons will maintain the right; and therein lies the holiness of war.' Might will be right, for at once, when war is proclaimed, there is 'a new rectification of boundaries corresponding with the reality of might displayed.'

But what of the Germans, or even the Prussians, who are not connected with the army, the university, or the bureaucracy? Maximilian Harden, the well-known journalist, said last year: Few people think of war. We need peace too much. War would compromise the results of the considerable efforts of these forty years which have given Germany considerable power; those who reflect on this cannot desire war, and, as Germans, we do not love it for itself.' Sudermann, the second German dramatist of the epoch, calling attention to the fact that the German people, 'laborious and pacific,' has full confidence in the Emperor and the Government, expressed his conviction that Prussia and Germany, ever since the Middle Ages, have never fought but in self-defence, except when their intention was to 'constitute themselves,' as in the war of 1870-1. But what of their openly proclaimed intention to 'constitute themselves' as the World-Power'? Alfred Kerr, literary man and editor, still in the same year, was as realistic as you please, 'looking facts in the face'-biological facts-as Treitschke bids his disciples do:

'Nothing can hold out against historical fatalities. The German arrives, with his rich blood, and I think his hour is come. The law of life requires that the less strong shall

be eliminated; the true conquerors are the hungry. And we are the hungry. The money we have gained has given us a taste for more; the well-being we have conquered has increased our appetite. When the German looks round about the world, he finds that he has come off badly, and that what is left him is only the scraps of a good meal. But this division, in his thoughts, in only provisional.'

As 'war,' says Treitschke, 'is the sphere in which the triumph of human reason displays itself most conspicuously,' and its 'majesty consists in the fact that murder can here be committed without passion,' so the conception of the Prussian State is equally in conformity with reason. Formulated in advance by Hegel, it is idealistic; and realistic, as in full agreement with the biological law. 'Radicals,' says Treitschke, 'pretend that the State springs from the free consent of citizens. History, on the contrary, teaches us that, most usually, States are founded against the wills of citizens by conquest and domination.' 'Whoever is not manly enough to look the truth in the face, that the State above all is might, had better leave politics alone.' Will is the essence of the State.' And will, to Treitschke as to Nietzsche, is the Will to Power,' the will to conquer and dominate.

Moreover, as the German army is invincible, so the State, the Prussian autocracy, is infallible in its methods and aims. Thanks be to God,' cried Moltke, 'the old patriarchal régime, the old theory that people are to be made happy in spite of themselves, still subsists in Prussia, in spite of progress'; while Bismarck had his own way of eulogizing Prussian mastery: 'Prussia is like a flannel-waistcoat; disagreeable at first, and scratchy -but it's warm and sticks well to the skin.' Thus, there is no room for the exercise of public opinion; the bureaucracy, that third institution of Germany, supplies such information as is needed.

But there is such a thing as responsibility? Ministers are responsible to an abstraction; to the non-moral-or immoral-State. Austria does not want war,' said a diplomatist to Bismarck, and it will avoid giving you a pretext for it.' To which the future Chancellor replied: 'I have a pocketful of pretexts and plausible causes.' It