Part 5

How difficult was the task to bring at last an emperor of all Germany to his crowning at Versailles, January 18, 1871, and how mighty the artificer who accomplished the work, may be learned from a glance at the political, geographical, and patriotic incoherence of the land that is now the German Empire.

Germany had no definite national policy from the death of Frederick the Great till the reign of Bismarck began in 1862. Hazy discussions of a confederation of princes, of a Prussian empire, of lines of demarcation, of acquisitions of German territory, were the phantoms of a policy, and even these were due to the pressure of Prussia.

The general political torpidity is surprisingly displayed, when one remembers that Goethe (1749-1832), who lived through the French Revolution, who was thirty-seven years old when Frederick the Great died, and who lived through the whole flaming life of Napoleon, was scarcely more stirred by the political features of the time than though he had lived in Seringapatam. He was a superlatively great man, but he was as parochial in his politics as he was amateurish in his science, as he was a mixture of the coxcomb and the boor, in his love affairs. Lessing, who died in 1781, Klopstock, who died in 1803, Schiller, who died in 1805, Kant, who died in 1804, Hegel, who died in 1831, Fichte, who died in 1814, Wolf, who died in 1824, "Jean Paul" Friedrich Richter, who died in 1825, Voss, who died in 1826, Schelling, who died in 1854, the two Schlegels, August Wilhelm and Frederick, who died in 1845 and in 1829, Jacob Grimm, who died in 1863, Herder, Wieland, Kotzebue, what a list of names! What a blossoming of literary activity! But no one of them, these the leaders of thought in Germany, at the time when the world was approaching the birthday of democracy through pain and blood, no one of these was especially interested in politics.

There was theoretical writing about freedom. Heine mocked at his countrymen and at the world in general, and deified Napoleon, from his French mattress, on which he died, in 1856, only fifty-seven years old. Fichte ended a course of lectures on Duty, with the words: "This course of lectures is suspended till the end of the campaign. We shall resume if our country become free, or we shall have died to regain our liberty." But Fichte neither resumed nor died! Herder criticised his countrymen for their slavish following of French forms and models in their literature, as in their art and social life. And well he might thus criticise, when one remembers how cramped was the literary vision even of such men as Voltaire and Heine. We have already mentioned some of Voltaire's literary judgments in the preceding chapter, and Heine ventured to compare Racine to Euripides! No wonder that Germany needed schooling in taste, if such were the opinions of her advisers. Such literary canons as these could only be accepted by minds long inured to provincial, literary, and social slavery.

Just as every little princeling of those days in Germany took Louis XIV for his model, so every literary fledgling looked upon Voltaire as a god, and modelled his style upon the stiff and pompous verses of the French literary men of that time.

Not even to-day has Germany escaped from this bondage. In Baden three words out of ten that you hear are French, and the German wherever he lives in Germany still invites you to Mittagessen at eight P. M. because he has no word in his own language for diner, and must still say anstaendiger or gebildeter Mensch for gentleman. To make the German even a German in speech and ideals and in independence has been a colossal task. One wonders, as one pokes about in odd corners of Germany even now, whether Herder's caustic contempt, and Bismarck's cavalry boots, have made every German proud to be a German, as now he surely ought to be. The tribal feeling still exists there.

Fichte's lectures on Nationality were suppressed and Fichte himself looked upon askance. The Schlegels spent a lifetime in giving Germany a translation of Shakespeare. Hegel wrote the last words of his philosophy to the sound of the guns at the battle of Jena. Goethe writes a paragraph about his meeting with Napoleon. Metternich, born three years before the American Revolution, and who died a year before the battle of Bull Run, declared: "The cause of all the trouble is the attempt of a small faction to introduce the sovereignty of the people under the guise of a representative system."

If this was the attitude of the intellectual nobility of the time, what are we to suppose that Messrs. Muller and Schultze and Fischer and Kruger, the small shop-keepers and others of their ilk, and their friends thought? Even forty years later Friedrich Hebbel, in 1844, paid a visit to the Industrial Exposition in Paris. He writes in his diary: "Alle diese Dinge sind mir nicht allein gleichgueltig; sic sind mir widerwaertig." Germany had not awakened even then to any wide popular interest in the world that was doing things. As Voltaire phrased it, France ruled the land, England the sea, and Germany the clouds, even as late as the middle of the nineteenth century. This is the more worth noting, as giving a peg upon which to hang Germany's astounding progress since that time. Even as late as Bismarck's day he complained of the German: "It is as a Prussian, a Hanoverian, a Wuertemberger, a Bavarian, or a Hessian, rather than as a German, that he is disposed to give unequivocal proof of patriotism." The present ambitious German Emperor said, in 1899, at Hamburg: "The sluggishness shown by the German people in interesting themselves in the great questions moving the world, and in arriving at a political understanding of those questions, has caused me deep anxiety." What kind of material had the nation-makers to work with! What a long, disappointing task it must have been to light these people into a blaze of patriotism! In those days America, though the population of the American colonies was only eleven hundred and sixty thousand in 1750, talked, wrote, and fought politics. The outstanding personalities of the time were patriots, soldiers, politicians, not a dreamer among them.

England was so nonchalantly free already, that the betting-book at White's Club records that, "Lord Glengall bets Lord Yarmouth one hundred guineas to five that Buonaparte returns to Paris before Beau Brummel returns to London!" Burke and Pitt, and Fox and North, and Canning might look after politics; Hargreaves and Crompton would take care to keep English industries to the fore, and Watt, and the great canal-builder Brindley, would solve the problem of distributing coal; their lordships cracked their plovers' eggs, unable to pronounce even the name of a single German town or philosopher, and showed their impartial interest, much as now they do, in contemporary history, by backing their opinions with guineas, with the odds on Caesar against the "Beau."

Weimar was a sunny little corner where poetry and philosophy and literature were hatched, well out of reach of the political storms of the time. The Grand Duke of Sachsen-Weimar-Eisenach with his tiny court, his Falstaffian army, his mint and his customs-houses, with his well-conducted theatre and his suite of litterateurs, was one of three hundred rulers in the Germany of that time.

The Holy Roman Empire, consisting, in Napoleon's time, of Austria, Prussia, and a mass of minor states, these last grouped together under the name of the Confederation of the Rhine, and wholly under French influence, lasted one thousand eight hundred and fifty-eight years, or from Caesar's victory of Pharsalia down to August the 1st, 1806, when Napoleon announced to the Diet that he no longer recognized it.

This institution had no political power, was merely a theoretical political ring for the theoretical political conflicts of German agitators and dreamers, and was composed of the representatives of this tangle of powerless, but vain and self-conscious little states. This Holy Roman Empire, with an Austrian at its head, and aided by France, strove to prevent the development of a strong German state under the leadership of Prussia. After Napoleon's day it became a struggle between Prussia and Austria. Austria had only eight out of thirty-six million German population, while Prussia was practically entirely German, and Prussia used her army, politics, and commerce to gain control in Germany. Even to-day Austria-Hungary contains the most varied conglomeration of races of any nation in the world. Austria has 26,000,000 inhabitants, of whom 9,000,000 are Germans, 1,000,000 Italians and Rumanians, 6,000,000 Bohemians and Slovacs, 8,000,000 Poles and Ruthenians, 2,000,000 Slovenes and Croatians. Of the 19,000,000 of Hungary there are 9,000,000 Magyars, 2,000,000 Germans, 2,500,000 Slovacs and Ruthenians, 3,000,000 Rumanians, and nearly 3,000,000 Southern Slays.

Weimar was one of the three hundred capitals of this limp empire, with tariffs, stamps, coins, uniforms, customs, gossip, interests, and a sovereign of its own. When Bismarck undertook the unifying of the customs tariffs of Germany, there were even then fifteen hundred different tariffs in existence!

Weimar had its salon, its notables: Goethe, Schiller, Wieland, Frau von Stein, Dr. Zimmermann as a valued correspondent; its Grand Duke Karl August and his consort; Herder, who jealous of the renown of Goethe, and piqued at the insufficient consideration he received, soon departed, to return only when the Grand Duchess took him under her wing and thus satisfied his morbid pride; its love affair, for did not the beautiful Frau von Werthern leave her husband, carry out a mock funeral, and, heralded as dead, elope to Africa with Herr von Einsiedel? But Weimar was as far away from what we now agree to look upon as the great events of the day, as were Lords Glengall and Yarmouth at White's, in Saint James's.

It requires imagination to put Goethe and Schiller and Wieland in the bow window at White's, and to place Lords Glengall and Yarmouth in Frau von Stein's drawing-room in Weimar; but the discerning eye which can see this picture, knows at a glance why England misunderstands Germany and Germany misunderstands England. For White's is White's and Weimar is Weimar, and one is British and one is German as much now as then! In the one the winner of the Derby is of more importance than any philosopher; in the other, philosophers, poets, professors, and playwrights are almost as well known, as the pedigrees of the yearlings to be sold at Newmarket, are known at White's. They still have plover's eggs early in the season at White's, and they still recognize the subtle distinction there between "port wine" and "port"; while in Weimar nobody, unless it be the duke, even boils his sauerkraut in white wine!

One could easily write a chapter on Weimar and its self-satisfied social and literary activities. There were three hundred or more capitals of like complexion and isolation: some larger, some smaller, none perhaps with such a splendid literary setting, but all indifferent with the indifference of distant relatives who seldom see one another, when the French Revolution exploded its bomb at the gates of the world's habits of thought.

No intelligent man ever objected to the French Revolution because it stood for human rights, but because it led straight to human wrongs. The dream was angelic, but the nightmare in which it ended was devilish. The French Revolution was the most colossal disappointment that humanity has ever had to bear.

More than the demagogue gives us credit for, are the great majority of us eager to help our neighbors. The trouble is that the demagogue thinks this, the most difficult of all things, an easy task. God and Nature are harsh when they are training men, and we, alas, are soft, hence most of our failures. Correction must be given with a rod, not with a sop. There lies all the trouble.

The political and philanthropic wise men were setting out for the manger and the babe, their eyes on the star, laden with gifts, when they were met by a whiff of grape-shot from the guns commanded by a young Corsican genius. The French Revolution found us all sympathetic, but making men of equal height by lopping off their heads; making them free by giving no one a chance to be free; making them fraternal by insisting that all should be addressed by the same title of, "citizen," was soon seen to be the method of a political nursery.

It was no fault of the French Revolution that it was no revolution at all, in any political sense. Men maddened by oppression hit, kick, bite, and burn. They are satisfied to shake the burden of the moment off their backs, even though the burden they take on be of much the same character. "It is perfectly possible, to revive even in our own day the fiscal tyranny which once left even European populations in doubt whether it was worth while preserving life by thrift and toil. You have only to tempt a portion of the population into temporary idleness, by promising them a share in a fictitious hoard lying in an imaginary strong-box which is supposed to contain all human wealth. You have only to take the heart out of those who would willingly labor and save, by taxing them ad misericordiam for the most laudable philanthropic objects. For it makes not the smallest difference to the motives of the thrifty and industrious part of mankind whether their fiscal oppressor be an Eastern despot, or a feudal baron, or a democratic legislature, and whether they are taxed for the benefit of a corporation called Society or for the advantage of an individual styled King or Lord," writes Sir Henry Maine. In short it matters not in the least what you baptize oppression, so long as it is oppression, or whether you call your tyrant "Jim" or "My Lord," so long as he is a tyrant. Many people are slowly awakening to the fact in England and in America, that plain citizen "Jim" can be a most merciless tyrant in spite of his unpretentious name and title. No royal tyrant ever dared to attempt to gain his ends by dynamiting innocent people, as did the trades-unionists at Los Angeles, or to starve a whole population as did the trades-unionists in London. We have not escaped tyranny by changing its name. The idea of the Contrat Social and of all its dilutions since, has been that individuals go to make up society, and that society under the name of the state must take charge of those individuals. The French Revolution was a failure because it fell back upon that tiresome and futile philosophy of government which had been that of Louis XIV. Louis XIV took care of the individual units of the state by exploiting them. He was a sound enough Socialist in theory. France gained nothing of much value along the lines of political philosophy.

Whether it is Louis XIV who says "l'etat c'est moi" or the citizens banded together in a state, who claim that the functions of the state are to meddle with the business of every man, matters little. It is the same socialistic philosophy at bottom, and it has produced to-day a France of thirty-eight millions of people pledged to sterility, one million of whom are state officials superintending the affairs of the others at a cost, in salaries alone, of upward of five hundred million dollars a year.

In no political or philosophical sense was the French Revolution a revolution at all. It was a change of administration and leaders, but not a change of political theory. The French Revolution put the state in impartial supremacy over all classes by destroying exemptions claimed by the nobility and the clergy, and thus extended the power of the state. The English Revolution without bloodshed reduced the power of the state, not for the advantage of any class, but for individual liberty and local self-government. We Americans are the political heirs of the latter, not of the former, revolution.

Germany was stirred slightly to hope for freedom, but stirred mightily to protest against anarchy later. These were the two influences from the French Revolution that affected Germany, and they were so contradictory that Germany herself was for nearly a hundred years in a mixed mood. One influence enlivened the theoretical democrat, and the other sent the armies of all Europe post-haste to save what was left of orderly government in France.

But Prussia was not what she had been under Frederick the Great. Frederick was more Louis XIV than Louis XIV himself. The economic and political errors of the French Revolution found their best practical exponent in Frederick the Great. In the introduction to his code of laws we have already mentioned are the words: "The head of the state, to whom is intrusted the duty of securing public welfare, which is the whole aim of society, is authorized to direct and control all the actions of individuals toward this end." Further on the same code reads: "It is incumbent upon the state to see to the feeding, employment, and payment of all those who cannot support themselves, and who have no claim to the help of the lord of the manor, or to the help of the commune: it is necessary to provide such persons with work which is suitable to their strength and their capacity."

When Frederick died he left Prussia in the grip of this enervating pontifical socialism, which always everywhere ends by palsying the individual, and through the individual the state, with the blight of demagogical and theoretical legislation. The fine army grew pallid and without spirit, the citizens lost their individual pride, the nation as a whole lost its vigor, and when Napoleon marched into Berlin, he remarked that the country hardly seemed worth conquering.

The century from the death of Frederick the Great, in 1786, to the death of William the First, in 1888, includes, in a convenient period to remember: the downfall of Frederick's patriotic edifice; the apathy and impotency that followed upon the breaking up of the bureaucracy he had welded into efficiency; the shuffling of the German states by Napoleon as though they were the pack of cards in a great political game; a revival of patriotism in Prussia after floggings and insults that were past bearing; the jealousies and enmities of the various states, the betrayal of one by the other, and finally the struggle between Austria and Prussia to decide upon a leader for all Germany; and at last the war against France, 1870-71, which was to make it clear to the world that Germany had been Prussianized into an empire.

Frederick William II, the nephew of Frederick the Great, who succeeded him, was King of Prussia from 1786 to 1797. Frederick William III, his son, and the husband of the beautiful and patriotic Queen Louisa, was King of Prussia from 1797 to 1840. Frederick William IV, a loquacious, indiscreet, loose-lipped sovereign, of moist intellect and mythical delusions, was King of Prussia from 1840 to 1857, when his mental condition made his retirement necessary, and he was succeeded by his brother, Frederick William Ludwig, first as regent, then as king in 1861, known to us as that admirable King and Emperor, William I, who died in 1888.

Perhaps the most remarkable characteristic of these sovereigns, to those of us who look upon Germany to-day as autocratically governed in fact and by tradition, is their willing surrender to the people, on every occasion when the demand has been, even as little insistent as the German demand has been. In the case of Frederick William IV, his claim, at least in words, upon his divine rights as a sovereign was the mark of a wavering confidence in himself. He was not satisfied with a rational sanction for his authority, but was forever assuring his subjects that God had pronounced for him; much as men of low intelligence attempt to add vigor to their statements by an oath. "I hold my crown," he said, "by the favor of God, and I am responsible to Him for every hour of my government." Much under the influence of the two scholars Niebuhr and Ranke, he hated the ideas of the French Revolution, and dreamed of an ideal Christian state like that of the Middle Ages. He was caricatured by the journals of the day, and laughed at by the wits, including Heine, and pictured as a king with "Order" on one hand, "Counter-order" on the other, and "Disorder" on his forehead.