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No. 15

JULY-SEPTEMBER, 1917 VOL. VIII

LET US FINISH UP OUR JOB

ERMANY and the United States are engaged in

GE

one common cause-in establishing democracy. We have been establishing it at home by overcoming the efforts of our proletariat to destroy it with clubs and dynamite; of our demagogues by vitiating the currency and all property rights, and offering the proletariat lawlessness as the price of votes; and of our politicians by wasting our taxes and selling our resources to venal interests; and now we are about to help establish it away from home. Germany is establishing it by demonstrating that the evils attending it with us are as nothing compared with the horrors that have resulted from absolutism with her, and that inevitably result from the lust of powera lust which always grows with the absolute possession of it. And now the champions of democracy and the champions of absolutism have at last reached the inevitable struggle which, it may be hoped, will bring the world-old question its settlement. It seems to rest mainly with us to make that settlement final. It has come to us to throw the final weight into the scale.

Mill or Spencer - we forget which, probably both, and probably many other wise men, have called attention to the fact that if you want to turn a scale, unless you put on the final needed trifle all you put on is wasted. That will be the case with all the blood and treasure put into this war by the losing side. The United States does not propose to be on that side.

on the sort of

As bearing on the nature of our task war we are in, there has been a great deal of discussion

over who or what started it. It is impossible to determine beyond cavil what started anything, but some things in the endless chain of events, or perhaps it would be better to say some strands in the infinite web, are more prominent in any given relation than others. We have generally found the most practicable point of view to be that the war started with the rape of Belgium. But among the thousand such points, the best for our present purpose is that it was started by Frederick the Great, who was virtually the originator of the Prussian religion of expansion by force.

In the fifteenth century the Hohenzollerns, whose very name marks them as plunderers, came from South Germany into Brandenburg, and began developing the country, but the idea of expanding it at the expense of its neighbors does not seem to have been very active before Frederick's father, early in the eighteenth century, got together a treasury and an army. Frederick apparently did not see any sense in having such things unless he used them. His first great enterprise was to rob a woman, when he took Silesia from Maria Teresa; and probably his next in importance was to let another woman, Catharine of Russia, lead him, with her and Austria, to conquer and divide up Poland. There may have been some shadow of an excuse for Frederick, in Poland's having long lorded it over Brandenburg until the Great Elector, Frederick's great-grandfather, released his country. But excuse or not, these accessions and some minor ones under Frederick made specially strong in Prussia the appetite then pervading all the petty German states for growing less petty at the expense of their neighbors; and that appetite has become part of the religion which Prussia associates with the name of Frederick. He, though a brigand, was a brigand on a large scale, and like his friend Voltaire was far from lacking in philosophical grasp or religious emotionof his own kind—the kind for which other brigands, in Italy, have long been famous. The state was his god

nothing for the good of the state could be wrong, and everything for the good of the state must be right. From him down, the idea has grown in Prussia until it has overcome all conflicting and modifying ideas — even the somewhat obvious one that there are other states, who, if not possessed by the divine impulse to grow, have at least a desire to hold their own.

When the present Kaiser was a boy, the victory over France threw a dazzling radiance over this Prussian religion of the state; and long before he came to the throne, he announced everywhere that his religion - his mission - was that of Frederick the Great. It was never because of France alone that he kept rolling up the great army that was always the first object of his interest. His ambition rolled up with his army until it embraced the world and became an insanity. Within a few years of his accession even so careful a journalist as Godkin freely wrote of him as a madman, and although he calmed down for a while, his destructive course of late recalls his earlier vagaries. His madness was contagious, especially, like contagions generally, among the young, and in time all Germany became infected. An expansion of the state of the Hohenzollern mind, which attracted the attention of the world, was given in 1900 by Prince Henry at the farewell banquet at Kiel when the German Boxer expedition sailed. His words cast a baleful light on Hohenzollern history all the way from when the children were mangled the other day in the air raid on the London schoolroom, back over the corpses floating from the Lusitania. The uncanny gleam wavers from the eagle on the helmet of William the Madman and the epaulette over his withered arm, way back to the lace on the cocked hat and the gold knob on the long cane of Frederick the Great. When Prince Henry diffused that corpse light, he gave out a superstition-one of those that have most cursed the human race, and one which the Hohenzollerns alone in Christian Europe have brought from the mouldy past to blight the

present. Of course his language was magniloquent, and yet Nature had marked the object of the magniloquence with a blemish which gave to the words that peculiar ridiculousness against which the German sense of humor affords no protection. All this- the terrible history, the blighting superstition, and the ridiculousness of it all, were in the prince's words when he closed his toast to his brother with a reverent allusion to "Your Majesty's sacred person."

The divine right of kings embraced that over the territory of their weaker neighbors. It is an idea of the eighteenth century come into the twentieth, and imposing upon it the terrible task of convincing the Germans that the exercise of such a right is too late that now such a thing "isn't done."

Many people say that human nature does not change even Lord Bryce said it in his two recent lectures before the English Academy. But without a change in human nature how could the human nature of the twentieth century now be united in war upon what remains of the human nature of the eighteenth?

Expansion by violence at the expense of civilized people is now sought only by despots, and even the proverbial despotism with an ideal despot is no longer the ideal government; and if it were, it would be as hard to realize as socialism and philosophical anarchy. As concerned the industrial and commercial interests of Germany, the present Kaiser was not a bad despot, but as soon as they were well built up, and he thought himself strong enough to apply the principles of Frederick the Great, the fatal weakness of despotism asserted itself, and he proceeded to ruin his own work so far as it was his. He was simply two hundred years behind the times. Perhaps the best demonstration is that he could not go on without at last coming in conflict with the nation which, America's youth may justify our suggesting, is most typical of the times.