The Iron Ration Part 33

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 Luchow, Korner and others, and the legions they commanded, was on the verge of becoming a non-thinking machine, which men exercising power for the l.u.s.t of power could employ, when industrial and commercial despots were not exploiting its const.i.tuents.

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 inst.i.tutions. 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 cla.s.s is still blind to the "_Mene, mene, tekel, upharsin_," but that cla.s.s 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, Wurtemberger, 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.

It must be borne in mind that these people speak one language and have been driven into closer union by the defense of a common cause. What is true of racial affinity in the Anglo-Saxon race is true in the case of the German race; all the more true since the latter lives within the same federation.

I must make reference here to the fact that even the German socialists are no great admirers of the republican form of government. Of the many of their leaders whom I have met, not a single one was in favor of the republic. Usually they maintained that France had not fared well under the republican form of government. When the great success of republicanism in Switzerland was brought to their attention, they would point out that what was possible in a small country was not necessarily possible in a large one. Upon the American republic and its government most of these men looked with disdain, a.s.serting that nowhere was the individual so exploited as in the United States. It was that very exploitation that they were opposed to, said these men. Government was necessary, so long as an anarchic society was impossible and internationalism was as far off as ever, as the war itself had shown.

Germany, they a.s.serted, was in need of a truly representative government that would as quickly as possible discard militarism and labor earnestly for universal disarmament. A monarch could labor better in that vineyard than the head of a republic, so long as his ministers were responsible to the people.

Upon that view we may look as the extreme measure of reform advocated by any political party in Germany to-day. It is that of the Scheidemann faction of Social-Democrats, a party which latterly has been dubbed "monarchical socialists." The extreme doctrinarians in the socialist camp, Haase and Liebknecht, go further than that, to be sure, but their demands will not be heeded, even after the pending election reforms have been made. The accession to articulate party politics in Germany, which these reforms will bring, will go princ.i.p.ally to the Liberal group, among whom the conservative socialists must be numbered to-day.

Not socialism, but rationalism will rule in Germany when the war is over.

One of the results of this will be that the Prussian Junker will have pa.s.sed into oblivion a few years hence. Even now his funeral oration is being said, and truly, to be fair to the Junker:

The evil that men do lives after them, The good is oft' interred with their bones.