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
We have been surfeited with peace talk till we are all irritable. One
hundredth part of an ounce of the same quality of peace powders that
we are using internationally would, if prescribed to a happy family in
this or any other land, lead to dissensions, disobedience, domestic
disaster, and divorce. Mr. Carnegie will have lived long enough to see
more wars and international disturbances, and more discontent born of
superficial reading, than any man in history who was at the same time
so closely connected with their origin. Perhaps it were better after
all if our millionaires were educated!
The peace party need war just as the atheists need God, otherwise they
have nothing to deny, nothing to attack. Peace is a negative thing
that no one really wants, certainly not the kind of peace of which
there is so much talking to-day, which is a kind of castrated
patriotism. Peace is not that. Peace can never be born of such
impotency. When German statesmen declare roundly that they will not
discuss the question of disarmament, they are merely saying that they
will not be traitors to their country. If the Emperor rattles the
sabre occasionally, it is because the time has not come yet, when this
German people can be allowed to forget what they have suffered from
foreign conquerors, and what they must do to protect themselves from
such a repetition of history.
When the final judgment is passed upon the Emperor, we must recall his
deep religious feeling that he is inevitably an instrument of God; his
ingrained and ineradicable method of reading history as though it were
a series of the ipse dixits of kings; his complacent neglect of how
the work of the world is done by patient labor; of how works of art
are only born of travail and tears: his obsession by that curious
psychology of kings that leads them to believe that they are somehow
different, and under other laws, as though they lived in another
dimension of space. In addition, he is a man of unusually rapid mental
machinery, of overpowering self-confidence, of great versatility, of
many advantages of training and experience, and, above all, he is
unhampered. He is answerable directly to no one, to no parliament, to
no minister, to no people. He is father, guardian, guide, school-
master, and priest, but in no sense a servant responsible to any
master save one of his own choosing.
The only wonder is that he is not insupportable. Those who have come
under the spell of his personality declare him to be the most
delightful of companions; what Germany has grown to be under his reign
of twenty-five years all the world knows, much of the world envies,
some of the world fears; what his own people think of him can best be
expressed by the statement that his supremacy was never more assured
than to-day.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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