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 the one, everything so far as possible is begun and carried on by
individual initiative; in the other the state gradually takes control
of all enterprise. The philosophy of the one is based upon the saying:
love one another; the political philosophy of the other is based upon
the assumption that men are not brethren, but beasts and mechanical
toys, who can only be governed by legislation and the police. The
ideal of the one is the good Samaritan, the ideal of the other is the
tax-collector. The one depends upon the wine and oil of sympathy and
human brotherhood; the other claims that the right to an iron bed in a
hospital, and the services of a state-paid and indifferent physician,
are "refreshing fruit," as though sympathy and consideration, which
are what our weaker brethren most need, could be distilled from taxes!
It is claimed for these Teutonic tribes, that those of them which
drifted down from the Scandinavian peninsula, are the blood and moral
ancestors of the particularist nations now in the ascendant in the
world. The love of independent self-government, born of the
geographical necessities of the situation, stamped itself upon these
people so indelibly, that Englishmen and Americans bear the seal to
this day. This change from the patriarchal to the particularist family
took place in this German race, and took place not in those who came
from the Baltic plain, but in those who came from the Saxon plain.
The tribes from the Baltic plain, the Goths, for example, merely
overran the Roman civilization, spread over it; drowned it in superior
numbers, and with superior valor; but it was the Germans from the
Scandinavian peninsula who conquered Rome, and conquered her not by
force alone, but by offering to the world a superior social and
political organization. It was to this branch of the German race that
Varus lost his legions, at the place where the Ems has its source, at
the foot of the Teutoburger Wald. Charlemagne was of these, and his
name Karl, or Kerl, or peasant, and the fact that his title is the
only one in the world compounded of greatness and the people in equal
measure, is the pith of what the Germans brought to leaven the whole
political world. He made the common man so great, that the world has
consented to his unique and superlative baptismal title of Karl the
Great, or Carolus Magnus, or Charlemagne.
The pivotal fact to be remembered is that these German tribes saved
Europe by their love of liberty, and by their virility, from the
decadence of an orientalized Rome. Rome, and all Rome meant, was not
destroyed by these ancestors of ours; on the contrary, they saved what
was best worth saving from the decline and fall of Rome, and made out
of it with their own vigorous laws a new world, the modern western
world. Great Britain, Germany, and the United States are not descended
from Egypt, Greece, or Rome, but from "those barbarians who issued
from the woods of Germany."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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