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Show IjSj GERMANY In HM By an Englishman. Bff T? ORGET for a momont the war and wasted Del- Vf glum and the ruins of Rheims cathedral, and B; think of Germany and all that she means to the W mind among the nations of Europe. She means j " cradle-songs and fairy stories and Christmas in K (f old moonlit towns, and a queer simple tender- ft ? ness always childish and musical; with philos- B ophers who could forget the world in thought K iliko children at play, and musicians who could m laugh suddenly like children through all their B v profundities of sound. Tho Germans of the past B were always children, even when they were old Hj and fat and learned; and tho world loved, while B it laughed at, tho contrast between their power fl 't and their childishness. All other nations had B some wickedness in them, hut they kept a kind B of innocence that made them tho musicians of B j the world. It was impossible for any other peo B pie to produce a Mozart, a genius as high as B Michelangolo or Shakespere but still a child that B I one would like to comfort when ho cried. These B Germans of the past were always spoken of as B the good Germans; and tho world admired their B innocence and Imposed upon it. It was assumed B that they would remain poor but honest, leaving B ' the Prizes of the world to other peoples. And B then there came a time when they were no longer B content to bo treated so, and they made Germany B into an Empire so that they might be imposed B upon no longer. Wo cannot complain of that, B and when wo regret the old Germany, they tell B us that our regrets are both sentimental and in- B torested; they have strong practical reasons for B preferring the new. B ' Well, let us confess that they have a right to B thQ Gern an empire. They have made it and B are proud of it. but what has it made of them? B Their task, when they took their place among B the strong nations of the world, was to put off B their childishness; having given up their inno- B cenco, it was necessary for them to learn wisdom. B" This fact they themselves were aware of. They B gavo up their innocence and set to work ta B learn wisdom with all their national industry and B docility. But still they tried to learn it like B children, as if it wero a lesson that any school B master hiight teach. Wisdom they believed was B 'the very opposite of innocence; and this new B 'nation they had made must be the very opposite, B in all its, aims and principles of the old Germans B tno d philosophers who had loved truth, the B' ' d musicians who had loved music, tho old teach- H ers who had loved learning, each for its own B sake. We remember how Mr. Boffin, the Boffin B' ; of Dickon's earlier and better intention, resolved fl' ;o become wise when he became rich, and how B he spoilt himself in the process. Well, the Ger- 9' mans now, if only wo can have the patience to B see it, have spoilt themselves in the same way; B and they have some of Mr. Boffin's absurdity B, even at this moment when they are so terrible. B! We cannot forgive them now, perhaps, but we Bj still laugh at them a little; and that is the way Bi to understanding, and so to forgiveness. Anyone Bi wh ia known Mr. Boffin before he was spoilt B would have felt the pity of the change and would B: have seen that, through tho change, he still re- B majned tho old Boffin. He had always been un- Bi ' worldly, and for this reason, when he made up f his mind to be a man of the vorld, ho overdid it. And so the Germans, having made up their minds tto be a nation of the world, are overdoing it with a German thoroughness. They have, as we have said, tried to learn wisdom like industrious scholars, but, being a people naturally simple, they haa chosen the worst possible teachers. They went to the Prussians and said to them Make us a nation of the world; and the Prussians, Prus-sians, for their own purposes, did their best, or their worst, with them. Prussia has gained her power over Germany because she is more utterly worldly than any other nation. We and tho French have been worldly enough, but we have always known that there was another world. Prussia has never known that or rather the other world for her, if it exists at all, is just the same as this one, except ex-cept that it is more favorable to Prussia. And tho Germans, diffident, wavering and credulous in matters of this world, have been overawed by her narrow certainty. They saw that the Prussians, Prus-sians, far more stupid than themselves, had gained gain-ed power; and they went to Prussia to learn the secret of it. So she taught them that all the German virtues, moral and intellectual, had been wasted hitherto because they had not been used in tho service of Germany. German thought, German virtue, German culture, must now be all as proudly and consciously German as the German Ger-man army, and, like that, must be organized for victory. The Prussians taught this because they did not understand tho German virtues; and the Germans learnt it because they were still children chil-dren and Prussia seemed to them to bo grown up. Any other people would have seen .the absurdity ab-surdity of the teaching; for, when tho German philosopher tried to think about the universe in the interests of Germany, he became more consciously con-sciously German, perhaps, but he ceased to be a philosopher. What Nietzsche said of German music was true also of German thought. "It lost its voice for the soul of Europe and sank into a merely national affair." And the Germans know this and pretend to be proud of it. They have sacrificed what they valued most, and are feverishly determined to value that for which they have sacrificed it. But at the same time they wish to eat their cake and have it. The old disinterested German virtues are gone; but the now German empire is to be admired because of them. The Spoilt Boffin calls upon mankind to admire him still for his kind and simple heart; and when mankind refuse, he says that it is all through envy of his riche3. For many years now the whole German people have been strained, uneasy and resentful, as if they were maintaining an unnatural attitude and listening suspiciously for the laughter of the world. And it must be confessed that the world has tittered at their awkward heroes, their incessant in-cessant unspontaneous hoch-hochlng, the defiant compliments they pay to their Germany a Germany Ger-many they seem to value as a millionaire might value a doubtful and expensive work of art. The world has laughed so at us; but we are thick-skinned and the Germans are not. (To them every titter seemed the proof of a dark conspiracy con-spiracy against them. They could not forget their two frontiers or that Teutonic superiority of theirs against which the Slavs are incessantly plotting. Feverishly they saw the world filled with a conflict of races, something more inevitr M able and inveterate than any conflict of nations, and feverishly they prepared for it. Then at last and suddenly they forced the catastrophe; they had. a right, they thought, to choose their own time for what was inevitable; they had a right to defend themselves by any means. And so the world suddenly discovered how thoroughly thorough-ly they learned their lesson. As the old Germans Ger-mans would sacrific everything to philosophy1 or learning or music, so the new Germans will sacrific everything to war. They had always been industrious apprentices in arts and sciences, and now they are industrious apprentices in a systematic deviltry. The old German conscientiousness conscien-tiousness remains to them even if the old Ger- m man conscience is changed. At this spectacle a purely intellectual being from another planet might laugh; but we see only the horror of it. There is a pedantry in their crimes and in their excuses for them winch makes them seem more inhuman than any outburst of brutal impulse. We have talked of Mr. Boffin, but he belongs to good-natured romance, and we cannot think of him with blood-stained hands. Yet we need to explain the Germans; and we cannot do that if we suppose that by a malign miracle the whole nation has suddenly willed evil. Ask them, and they will tell you that they have a right to their theory of war, as they had a right to all their old theories. But the old theories were in the air, and the new one is being practiced in Belgium. That makes the fatal difference to us, but not to them. They do not know how dangerous theories theor-ies are when they affect the interests and impulses im-pulses and brute instincts of men. Some of their own militarist fanatics have said that they have no political aptitude, and they prove that now in their devotion to a theory of self-preservation which is leaving them without a friend in the civilized world. War, they believe, is war, in all ages a return to 'barbarism; but how if the world has reached a stage at which it will not allow any nation to return to barbarism, at which the conscious barbarism is treated as the enemy of tho human race? Then he has no chance unless he is stronger than the human race. And the Germans now have allowed their theory to ride them almost into that desperate pass. They have done what they hoped to do; they have frightened fright-ened the world, and it laughs at them no longer. ' But we feel that Providence has played an ugly trick, as Dickens would have done if he had turned Mr. Boffin into a homicidal maniac. And the worst of it is that the Germans are still of the same nature aa their fathers, and will some day return to their right minds. That we have always to jemember. and to pitty them more oven than their victims. That old childish Germany of the fairy stories and the cradle songs has been, and it will be again; but the Germans of the future will have memories that no children ought to have. Town Talk. |