In Germany we found a remarkable condition. In one sense unspoiled by
her great victories, so cheaply bought, and the acquisition of so much
wealth in indemnity, the nation was just starting two propagandas. One
was to organize productive industry and encourage the sciences and
arts, with the object of making their nation foremost as a commercial
producer. At the same time, Germany planned to carry her products to
the four corners of the earth, in which, for forty years, she was
entirely successful.
The second, as unholy and unrighteous as the first, was praiseworthy,
was militarism, in which the rulers of the nation sought to make
the profession of the soldier universal, with the deliberate and
cold-blooded purpose of conquering the rest of the world, as
Alexander, Hannibal, Cæsar and Napoleon had planned before. Germany
had in view also the creation of a navy which could overcome
England's, so she might rule the world on both land and sea. But for
the heroism and self-sacrifice of the little kingdom of Belgium, with
only eight millions of people, they would have succeeded.
We saw many idle soldiers lying on the grassy parapets of their
forts smoking, while near them women dressed in rags carried dirt
in wheelbarrows to form additional parapets. Nannie instinctively
foresaw the future. She even then denounced those people as barbarous
and inhuman, and for the rest of her life she hated bitterly German
militarism.
In England we found the people divided into numerous classes, royalty,
nobility, gentlemen, tradespeople, and common people. Many of these
latter, for want of the ambition and self-reliance necessary to bring
about success, had become sordid and drunken.
There were hundreds of street cars in Paris and its environs
broad-mindedly labeled "American Railway," but hardly one in England.
In Manchester (then a larger city than New York), an apparently
intelligent Scotch policeman, recognizing me as an American, proudly
pointed to a brand new street car with one horse, and remarked, "I
suppose you don't have anything like that in America?" When I replied
that every city in the United States having twenty thousand population
had a street car system, he evidently regarded me as a sort of
American Baron Munchausen.
The upper classes relied upon their control of the sea by the largest
navy in the world, indirectly to extort taxes from their millions of
subjects in their vast possessions, governed without their consent.
Suppressing ambition for democracy and restraining maritime commerce
of other nations, is perhaps not as cruel and barbarous as the
intended control of the world by Germany, but is quite as unrighteous
and has been and still is detrimental to the progress and advancement
of weaker peoples.