|
HONESTY IS THE BEST POLICY
Published in the Fatherland New York, New York, U.S.A. 20 January 1915 (pages 5-6)
IX. Against the Boers we Englishmen did not dare employ savage troops. Europe would have risen in arms at the abomination.
Today we do it, because all armed Europe is already either for us or against us. And, with all that, we use the Japanese! Can we complain if the German papers say the that Kaiser is fighting for culture, for civilization, when the flower of the allied troops are black, brown, and yellow "heathens," the very folks whom we have stopped from hook-swinging, suttee, child-murder, human sacrifice, and cannibal feast? From Senegambia, Morocco, the Soudan, Afghanistan, every wild band of robber clans, come fighting men to slay the compatriots of Kant, Hegel, Goethe, Schiller, Heine, Beethoven, Wagner, Mozart, Dürer, Helmholtz, Hertz, Haeckel, and a million other perhaps obscurer, no less noble, men of the Fatherland of music, of philosophy, of science, and of medicine, the land where education is a reality and not a farce, the land of Luther and Melancthon, the land whose life blood washed out the Ecclesiastical tyranny of the Dark Ages.
The Huns!
Indignation has led me from the point of my paragraph. It was my purpose to expose the infamous pretense—which, however, is not too inane to dupe even clean-sighted Englishmen in their hysteric hour—the pretense that the Kaiser is a "mad dog," a homicidal maniac, a man like Nebuchadnezzar in the Hebrew fable, or like Atilla the Scrouge of God, or Tamberlane.
It is a lie. The Kaiser has always been, and is today, a man of peace. He has indeed lived up to the maxim Si vis pacem, para bellum and, loaded with the legacy of hate which the impolitic annexation of Alsace-Lorraine had thrust upon his shoulders, he could do no less without offering the breast of Germany to the ravisher. A lamb to the slaughter, indeed, with La Revanche in every mouth! What would he do, with men yet alive who remembered Jena, and the ceaseless raids and ravages of Bonaparte?
But in a hundred crises he kept his head; he kept the peace. He had plenty of chances to smash France forever; he did not take them. An ambitious prince might have put a relative on the throne of Louis XIV while France was torn by the Boulanger affair, the Panama scandal, the Dreyfus horror, when Diogenes might have gone through France with a modern search-light for his lantern without finding a single man who was not a traitor to his country, or at least to the Republic, and the most trustworthy man of affairs was he who could be trusted to put the "double-cross" on every one. The Kaiser never stirred.
It would have been easy to destroy the Russian menace at the time when Japan was straining the sinews of the Tartar giant, or when the Moscow Revolution showed that the Tsar could not trust his own soldiers, and the Imperial Guard, hastily summoned from St. Petersburg, shut up the garrison of Moscow in the Kremlin, trained their own guns upon them, and disarmed them. The Kaiser did nothing.
And then came the Triple Entente.
Germany was held like a deer in a lion's jaws. Austria, her only friend, was being ruined by insidious politics even more surely than by open attacks. Barred in the Adriatic, barred in the Baltic, the Teuton had but one small strip of reasonably open coast. That the Kaiser made that coast the greatest navel base in the world was held to be a "menace."
Surely the Russo-Japanese war and the Boer war showed plainly—if any fool there were who could not see it à priori—that the greatest, widest, best, and only impregnable military base is the sea. Today we can bring Russian troops from Vladivostock or Archangel and land them at Ostend, a million at a time, and Germany must be well-served indeed by spies if she knows of the operation in time to guard against it. Is it then so treacherous and aggressive if Germany, threatened by an alliance (hypocritically described as an entente) of powers outnumbering her by six to one, sought to keep open a path to raid that universal base of operations? For this she has ruined herself financially, has hampered her social and economic development, has been compelled to serve the Leah of war when the whole genius of the nation lies with the Rachel of peace. The English are the least military and the most warlike of all peoples, said someone; the converse is truer still of Germany.
From Vercingetorix to Wilhelm I, Germany, as Germany, hardly could claim a victory. Even today it is military Prussia which drags Bavaria art-lover, and all the peasant provinces, to war. And all the might of the Junker and his fierceness and his bravery and his aristocratic prestige could never do it but for the root-fact which every German feels: that, unarmed, he would be the morsel of a moment for the Russian Octopus, or the toy to grasp and shatter of some warrior schoolboy like Caesar or Napoleon.
Pan-Germanism itself, intrinsically bad as it is if regarded from the standpoint of the Universe, has its apology. One becomes tired of being an irremovable obstacle; one thinks it may be less strain on the nerves if one takes one's turn at being an irresistible force. "Why does a goalkeeper look old sooner than a centre forward?"
Even the stolid Teuton nature must tire of the perpetual squeeze of Russia, the spurs of the French chanticleer struck even and anon in his hide.
And since the Entente the ordeal of the Kaiser has been Promethean. Insult after insult he has had to swallow; injury upon injury he has had to endure. The Kiao-Chau adventure, harmless and rational, was balked, then sterilized, then counterpoised. The colonies did not prosper. England built like a maniac against his navy; Churchill deliberately pulled his nose by the impudent proposal for limitation of arguments.
Agadir was a fresh humiliation; for a few acres of uninhabitable jungle on the Congo he had to surrender all interest in Morocco, a country he had nursed for years.
It is still a diplomatic secret, and I must not betray it. But who financed Italy in her Tripolitan adventure, and why?
The last straw was the Balkan war. Blotted was his one hope of escape to the East; his ewe-lamb, Turkey, was torn to pieces before his eyes, and he could not stir a finger to prevent it. Austria still blocked in the Adriatic, Italy alienated from the Triple Alliance, the Slav expanding everywhere, Constantinople itself threatened, Roumania (even) turning toward Russia, he must have felt like a victim of that maiden of armor and spears that once executed justice on the weak. What was his only success? The formation of the Kingdom of Albania—a kingdom pour rire, a kingdom à la Gilbert and Sullivan, Prince William of Wied less like a cat on hot bricks than like a spider on a glowing shovel. He never possessed so much as his capital in peace.
And all this had been accomplished without sword drawn or cannon fired.
Here then stood Wilhelm, dauntless but defeated. His diplomacy had failed; his one ally was handicapped by domestic unrest; he was isolated in Europe; England was increasing her navy at a pace he could never beat; France, with her three years' law, was proposing to increase her army by fifty per cent at a stroke; Russia was turning flank, pushing on through the Balkans subtly and surely.
And the Kaiser answered, "I am the servant of God; I stand for peace. The Crown Prince is for war; I banish him from the Court. When I am dead let him be master; but while I live I am for peace. And let him that draws the sword perish by the sword!"
And the Triple Entente gathered closer and chuckled: Aha! he dare not fight. Let us frighten the garotte!
So Servia plots and executes the crime of Sarajevo. Austria, its aged Emperor smitten yet again and most foully, demands imperatively the disclosure of the accomplices of the assassins. Servia replies in terms of evasion, evasion impudently cynical. Austria stirs. Russia—and there is no pretense possible, the murder of the Archduke was either instigated by Panslavism or was a threat equally to the Tsar as to any other ruler—replies by mobilizing. Before Austria has moved a man or a gun, Russia mobilizes.
And what was the position of the German Emperor? His bankers had told him that Germany could no longer endure the weight of her armor; the incident of Zabern had shown the Junkers that they could still control the Social Democrats, but that another year or two would see the end of their power. He must strike now or never.
He looked about him. The weakness of the British Government and its supposed preoccupation with the Ulster folly and the suffragettes encouraged him to hope.
He saw France, mere rottenness, its bandages torn off by the pistol-shot of Mme. Caillaux.
All things conspired; he would make one final effort for peace by threatening Russia.
And then he suddenly knew that it was no good. Nothing was any good; nothing would ever be any good again. Sir Edward Grey spoke for peace, spoke of neutrality, in the House of Commons at a moment when thousands of British troops were already in Belgian waters, and the fleet, concentrated and ready for action, already held the North Sea.
France withdrew her troops from the frontier "so as to avoid any possibility of incidents which might be mistaken for aggression," while her Algerian and Senegambian troops were on the water, half-way to Marseilles.
He knew that this time there was no hope of peace. Abdication itself would hardly have saved Germany from a long-prepared, carefully-planned war, a war whose avowed object, an object in the mouth of every man in the street, was the destruction of Austria, the dismemberment of Germany. They had got him.
Even a worm will turn; even a Quaker will fight if he is cornered.
Wilhelm struck.
I write in English for those English who count, and this is the proper way to view the matter. Germany is a rich prize. We can capture German trade, German manufactures, German shipping, German colonies. We can exact an indemnity sufficient to cripple Germany for a dozen generations. We can split Germany into six kingdoms or republics, and weaken her beyond repair forever. We can double-cross Russia by insisting on the creation of a new Poland. We can destroy the German fleet, and economize on dreadnoughts. We can force our proletariat to accept conscription and starve off the social revolution. We can drown the Irish question in Lethe; we can fight a general election on the war, and keep the present gang of politicians in office.
And, best of all! we can achieve all this in the name of Honor, and the Sanctity of Treaties, and the Cause of the Democracies, and we can ask the blessing of God upon our arms in the name of Liberty, and Civilization, and Prosperity, and Progress. |