Germany and the Germans from an American Point of ViewCollier, Price
History
Germany and the Germans from an American Point of View
Collier, Price
Germany; National characteristics, German
In other chapters dealing more particularly with the political
development of Germany, and with the salient characteristics, mental
and moral, of the people, we shall see how it has come about, that one
man can thus impregnate a whole nation of sixty-five millions with his
own aims and ambitions, to such an extent, that they may be said, so
to speak, to live their political, social, martial, religious, and
even their industrial, life in him. It is a phenomenon of personality
that exists nowhere else in the world to-day, and on so large a scale
and among so enlightened a people, perhaps never before in history.
Nothing has made scientific accuracy in dealing with the most
interesting and most important factors in the world, so utterly
inaccurate and misleading, as those infallibly accurate and impersonal
agents, electricity and the sun. If one were to judge a man by his
photographs, and the gossip of the press, one would be sure to know
nothing more valuable about him than that his mustache is brushed up,
and that his brows are permanently lowering. Personality is so evasive
that one may count upon it that when a machine says "There it is!"
then there it is not! You will have everything that is patent and
nothing that is pertinent.
We are forever talking and writing about the smallness of the world,
of how much better we know one another, and of how much more we should
love one another, now that we flash photographs and messages to and
fro, at a speed of leagues a second. Nothing could be more futile and
foolish. These things have emphasized our differences, they have done
nothing to realize our likeness to one another. We are as far from one
another as in the days, late in the tenth century, when they
complained in England that men learned fierceness from the Saxon of
Germany, effeminacy from the Fleming, and drunkenness from the Dane.
As probably the outstanding figure and best-known, superficially
known, man in the world, the German Emperor has escaped the notice of
very few people who notice anything. His likeness is everywhere, and
gossip about him is on every tongue. He is as familiar to the American
as Roosevelt, to the Englishman as Lloyd-George, to the Frenchman as
Dreyfus, to the Russian as his Czar, and to the Chinese and Japanese
as their most prominent political figure. And yet I should say that he
is comparatively little known, either externally or internally, as he
is.
It is perhaps the fate of those of most influence to be misunderstood.
Of this, I fancy, the Emperor does not complain. Indeed, those feeble
folk who complain of being misunderstood, ought to console themselves
with the thought that practically all our imperishable monuments, are
erected to the glory of those whom we condemned and criticised;
starved and stoned; burned and crucified, when we had them with us.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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