Part 53

The result of this is that the older investments, be they in government securities or commercial paper, have lost in value. We must take a look at an investor in order to understand that fully. Let us say a man owns in government bonds and industrial stocks the sum of 200,000 marks. At 4 per cent. that would give him an annual income of 8,000 marks, a sum which in 1914 would have kept him in Germany very comfortably, if his demands were modest. To-day that income would go about a third as far. His 8,000 marks would buy no more than what four years ago 2,666 marks would have bought. His lien against the wealth of the community, in other words, is 2,666 marks to-day instead of 8,000 marks. Those who had to produce what the man consumed in 1914 have to produce to-day only a third of that. They would have to produce as before if the government returned to the old value of the mark, and since such a production is impossible to-day, with over two million able-bodied men dead and permanently incapacitated, with the same number of women and their offspring to be cared for, and with the losses from deterioration to be made good, the German government cannot take measures that would restore the pre-war value of the mark, especially since it would have to pay interest on war loans with a mark having more purchasing power than had the mark turned over to the government in these loans.

In adopting the policy of cheaper money Central Europe is doing exactly what the Roman government did more than two thousand years ago and what every other government has since then done when wars had made the expenditure of much of the state's wealth necessary. Capital is the loser, of course. That cannot be avoided, however, for the reason that capital is nothing but the surplus of labor--that part of production which is not consumed. During the European War there was no such actual surplus. The increase in capital, as this increase appeared on the books of the state treasury and the investors, was nothing but an inflation--an inflation which now must be assimilated in figures, since its influence upon actual production is nil.

I have already mentioned that the bankers of Central Europe are well disposed toward a partial cancelation of the public debts. They agree not because of patriotic motives, but for the reason that such a cancelation would better the purchasing value of the currency. A partial repudiation of the war loans would immediately force down prices of food and necessities, in which event the mark or crown would again buy more or less than it bought in 1915, let us assume. For the exigencies incident to foreign trade the step has merits of its own. It should not be necessary to point out that a Germany living on an American-dollar basis, as it is now doing with its depreciated mark, would find it hard to undersell the American competitor. German industrial and commercial interests must bear this in mind, and on that account will do their best to preserve the margin which has favored them in the past. Cheap money and high prices do not make for cheap labor, naturally. Even to-day labor in Central Europe has risen in price to within 70 per cent. of its cost in the United States, while food is about 15 per cent. dearer than in the American cities.

Central Europe, all of Europe, for that matter, will live on what may be called the pre-war American basis when the war is over. The advantages enjoyed by the American dollar in Europe in the past are no more. Gone are the days when an American school-mistress could spend her vacation in Germany or Austria-Hungary and live so cheaply that the cost of the trip would be covered by the difference in the price of board and lodging. The cheap tour of Central Europe is a thing of the past--unless the public debt of the United States should increase so much that some slight advantage accrue therefrom. For what has taken place, or will take place in Europe, will happen in the United States when economic readjustment must be undertaken.

Aside from some damage done to buildings in East Prussia, Alsace-Lorraine, Galicia, and along the Isonzo, the Central states have not suffered directly from the war. The losses sustained in the districts mentioned are relatively small, and much of them has already been repaired. Reconstruction of that sort will not be so great a task, therefore.

Much labor and huge expenditures will be required, however, in the rehabilitation of the railroads and the highroads. It will be necessary to relay at least a quarter of the bed mileage with new ties and rails, and fully one-half of the rolling stock and motive power now in use will have to be discarded before rail transportation in Central Europe can be brought to its former high standard.

Pressing as this work is, the people of the Central states must first of all increase the production of their soil and bring their animal industry into better condition. For the first of these labors two or three years will suffice; for the second a decade is the least that will be needed. It will be necessary for many years to come to restrict meat consumption. With the exception of South America nobody has meat to sell, and since all will draw on that market high prices are bound to limit the quantities any state in Europe can buy.

On the whole, the damage done by the war to the Central Europeans is not so catastrophic as one would be inclined to believe. In fact, the damage is great only when seen in the light of pre-war standards. In Central Europe, and, for that matter, in all of Europe, nobody expects trains to run a hundred kilometers per hour any more. The masses have forgotten the fleshpots of Egypt, and will be glad to get pork and poultry when no beef is to be had. Enough bread, with a little butter or some cheese on it, will seem a godsend to them for many a year. The wooden shoe has not proved so bad a piece of footgear, and the patched suit is no longer the hallmark of low caste. Enough fuel will go far in making everybody forget that there was a war.

Viewed from that angle, reconstruction in Central Europe is not the impossible undertaking some have painted it. The case reminds somewhat of the habitual drunkard who has reformed and feels well now despite the fact that he has irretrievably damaged his health.

The assertion has been made that the mechanical improvements and innovations made during the war would in a large measure balance the material damage done. I have tried hard to discover on what such claims are founded. The instance that would support such a contention has yet to be discovered, so far as I know. The little improvements made in gasolene and other internal-combustion engines are hardly worth anything to the social aggregate. I hope that nobody will take as an improvement the great strides made in the making of guns and ammunition. The stuff that has been written on the development of the aeroplane in war as a means of communication in peace is interesting, but not convincing.

From that angle the world has not been benefited by the great conflagration that has swept it.

But great hopes may be placed in the mental reconstruction that has been going on since the war entered upon its downward curve. Men and women in the countries at war have become more tolerant--newspaper editors and writers excepted, perhaps. As the war developed into a struggle between populations rather than between armies, the psychology of the firing-line spread to those in the rear. I have met few soldiers and no officers who spoke slightingly of their enemies. They did not love their enemies, as some idealists demand, but they respected them. There is no hatred in the trenches. Passions will rise, of course, as they must rise if killing on the battle-field is not to be plain murder. But I have seen strong men sob because half an hour ago they had driven the bayonet into the body of some antagonist. I have also noticed often that there was no exultation in the troops that had defeated an enemy. It seemed to be all in the day's march.

In the course of time that feeling reached the men and women home. The men from the front were to educate the population in that direction. It may have taken three years of reiteration to accomplish the banishment of the war spirit. When I left Central Europe it had totally vanished. The thing had settled down to mere business.

There is also a socio-political aftermath.

That socialism will rule Central Europe after the war is believed by many. I am not of that opinion. But there is no doubt that the several governments will steal much of the thunder of the Social-Democrats. Some of it they have purloined already. The later phases of food control showed usually a fine regard for the masses. That they did this was never more than the result of making virtue of necessity. Endless hair-splitting in political theories and tendency would result, however, if we were to examine the interest in the masses shown by the several governments. What the socialist wishes to do for the masses for their own good the government did for the good of the state. Since the masses are the state, and since I am not interested in political propaganda of any sort, mere quibbling would result from the attempt to draw distinctions. Politics have never been more than the struggle between the masses that wanted to control the government and the government that wanted to control the masses.

SCENE IN GERMAN SHIP-BUILDING YARD

The great ship in the background has just been launched. Though the war left Germany no man to spare, every effort has been made to materially increase the country's merchant marine. To-day Germany's mercantile fleet is stronger than ever.]

For the first time in the history of Central Europe, the several governments had to publicly admit that the masses were indispensable in their scheme instead of merely necessary. That they were necessary had been realized in the manner in which the farmer looks upon the draft animal. The several governments had also done the best they could to have this policy be as humane as possible. There were sick benefits and pensions. Such things made the populace content with its lot. So long as old age had at least the promise that a pension would keep the wolf from the door, small wages, military service, heavy taxes, and class distinctions were bound to be overlooked by all except the wide-awake and enterprising. The few that were able to examine the scheme from without, as it were, might voice their doubts that this was the best manner in which the ship of state could be steered, but their words generally fell on the ears of a populace to which government was indeed a divine-right institution.

I have met Germans and Austro-Hungarians who were able to grasp the idea that the government ought to be their servant instead of their master. Their number was small, however. Generally, such men were socialists rather than rationalists.

It is nothing unusual to meet persons, afflicted with a disease, who claim that nothing is wrong with them. The "giftie" for which Burns prayed is not given to us. It was so with the Germans and the thing called militarism. I have elsewhere referred to the fact that militarism as an internal condition in the German Empire meant largely that thinking was an offense. But the Prussian had accepted that as something quite natural. We need not be surprised at that. Prussia is essentially a military state. The army made Prussia what it is. Not alone did it make the state a political force, but it also was the school in which men were trained into good subjects. In this school the inherent love of the German for law and order was supplemented by a discipline whose principal ingredient was that the state came first and last and that the individual existed for the state.

The non-Prussians of the German Empire, then, knew that militarism, in its internal aspect, was a state of things that made independent thought impossible. To that extent they hated the system, without overlooking its good points, however. The fact is that much of what is really efficient in Germany had its birth in the Prussian army. Without this incubator of organization and serious effort, Germany would have never risen to the position that is hers.

As a civilian I cannot but resent the presumption of another to deny me the right to think. Yet there was a time when I was a member of an organization that could not exist if everybody were permitted to think and act accordingly. I refer to the army of the late South African Republic. Though the Boer was as free a citizen as ever lived and was of nothing so intolerant as of restraint of any sort, it became necessary to put a curb upon his mind in the military service. That this had to be done, if discipline was to prevail, will be conceded by all. The same thing is practised by the business man, whose employees cannot be allowed to think for themselves in matters connected with the affairs of the firm. On that point we need not cavil.

The mistake of the men in Berlin was that they carried this prohibition of thinking too far. It went far beyond the bounds of the barrack-yard--permeated, in fact, the entire socio-political fabric. That was the unlovely part of militarism in Prussia and Germany. The policy of the several governments, to give state employment only to men who had served in the army, carried the command of the drill sergeant into the smallest hamlet, where, unchecked by intelligent control, it grew into an eternal nightmare that strangled many of the better qualities of the race or at best gave these qualities no field in which they might exert themselves. The liberty-loving race which in the days of Napoleon had produced such men as Scharnhorst and Lüchow, Körner and others, and the legions they commanded, was on the verge of becoming a non-thinking machine, which men exercising power for the lust of power could employ, when industrial and commercial despots were not exploiting its constituents.

The war showed some of the thinkers in the government that this could not go on. Bethmann-Hollweg, for instance, saw that the time was come when Prussia would have to adopt more liberal institutions. The Prussian election system would have to be made more equitable. Agitation for that had been the burning issue for many a year before the war, and I am inclined to believe that something would have been done by the government had it not feared the Social-Democrats. The fact is that the Prussian government had lost confidence in the people. And it had good reason for that. The men in responsible places knew only too well that the remarkable growth of socialism in the country was due to dissatisfaction with the rule of Prussian Junkerism. They did not have the political insight and sagacity to conclude that a people, which in the past had not even aspired to republicanism, would abandon the Social-Democratic ideals on the day that saw the birth of a responsible monarchical form of government. What they could see, though, was that the men coming home after the war would not permit a continuation of a government that looked upon itself as the holy of holies for which the race was to spill its blood whenever the high priest of the cult thought that necessary.

"We are fighting for our country!" is the reply that has been given me by thousands of German soldiers. Not a one has ever told me that he was fighting for the Emperor, despite the fact that against their King and Emperor these men held no grudge. And here I should draw attention to the fact that the German Emperor means comparatively little to the South Germans, the Bavarian, for instance. He has his own monarch. While the Emperor is de jure and de facto the War Lord, he is never more than a sort of commander-in-chief to the non-Prussian part of the German army.

Liberal government is bound to come for Germany from the war. There can be no question of a change in the form of government, however. Those who believe that the Germans would undertake a revolution in favor of the republican form of government know as little of Germany as they know of the population said to be on Mars. The German has a monarchical mind. His family is run on that principle. The husband and father is the lord of the household--Der Herr im Hause. Just as the lord of the family household will have less to say in the future, so will the lord of the state household have less to say in the years to come. There will be more co-operation between man and woman in the German household in the future and the same will take place in the state family. The government will have to learn that he is best qualified to rule who must apply the least effort in ruling--that he can best command who knows best how to obey.

This is the handwriting on the wall in Germany to-day. A large class is still blind to the "Mene, mene, tekel, upharsin," but that class must either mend its way or go down in defeat. The German at the front has ceased to think himself the tool of the government. He is willing to be an instrument of authority so long as that authority represents not a wholly selfish and self-sufficient caste.

The indications for their development lie in the fact that the German generally does not hold the Prussian element in the empire responsible for the war. The Bavarian does not hate the Prussian. The West German does not entertain dislike for the men east of the Elbe river. What Bismarck started in 1870 is being completed by the European War. All sectionalism has disappeared. Three years' contact with the German army, and study of the things that are German, has convinced me that to-day there is no Prussian, Bavarian, Saxon, Würtemberger, Badenser, Hanoverian, or Hessian. I have never met any but Germans, in contrast to conditions in the Austro-Hungarian army, where in a single army corps I could draw easily distinction between at least four of the races in the Dual Monarchy.