GERMANY AND THE GERMANS" JUST before the outbreak of the
Austro-Prussian War of 1866, the Germans were startled by a leader in the Times announcing the accession of Prussia to the Zollverein, an event at that date full thirty years old. Since then we have mended our knowledge. We have even learnt to style the Queen's grandson by his constitutional designation of Ger- man Emperor, and some of us are beginning to understand that the Government of the Fatherland is not a military despotism. Those who wish to enlarge their information on the social and religious life, culture, politics, and parties of Germany, may consult the present book with advantage. Mr. Dawson writes well, and from experience, and has few prejudices; his defects are narrowness of personal horizon (which may not be his fault), and timidity when dealing with certain German practices, habits, and manners, calculated to strike English readers as ridiculous, which, again, may have its grounds.
A Jove principium,—let us start with the Army, the institu- tion in which the New Germany appears to most advantage. Mr. Dawson speaks in elevated language of the convulsions of amazement into which mankind fall when notice is given of another stupendous augmentation of the German Army. Last year, he says, all previous surprises were eclipsed by the still "more startling" announcement of a plan for giving Germany 4,500,000 fighting-men, thus "enabling her to cry ' quits ' with France and Russia." This may be Mr. Dawson's private estimate, but the Committee of the Reichstag ap- pointed to investigate the subject, reported, after they had interviewed the Prussian War Office, that the eventual war strength of France and Russia must be put at 8,500,000 men, showing a balance of 4,000,000 to be made up somehow by Germany before she could cry " quits " with those Powers. Mr. Dawson, however, knows better, and he goes on to ex- pound the German system of universal liability to military service, and expounds it wrongly. He assigns to that liability (the Landsturm period excepted) a period of twelve years in all, whereas it lasts for nineteen years—that is, until the citizen is thirty-nine. Then he calls the term for presence with the colours three years, when, as is notorious, the reduction to two years was one of the hinges of the late German Parliamentary crisis; and he lops off about 80,000 men from the Army effective of the future, from not knowing that the figures which he uses exclude "sous-offs." The author does justice to the German Array as an educational mu-thine, devoting superfluous rhetoric to the evolution of the smart Jager or Milan from the lumbering boor. But he ignores the immense effect of universal service as a con- servative social force. That the rank-and-file are ready, as • Gernsanv and the Germans. By William Harbutt Dawson. In 2 vols. London: Chapman and Hall.
the; French captain put it, to fire, if ordered, "Sur le bon Dieu," is no novelty. What we mean is, that in the house- holds, shops, banks, counting-houses, factories, public offices of Germany, there is hardly a man, master or servant, who has not brought back from his barrack and parade-ground life, a tendency to instantaneous, unquestioning submis- sion to authority. In individuals gifted with an extra dose of free-will, this temper may tend to become dormant, but it is inevitably refreshed whenever the uniform is again put on, be it only for a ball or other festive occasion. Our German friends marvel at the Selbsandigkeit of Englishmen, at our national independence of character, manifested by all kinds and conditions of men in the face of authority of every species, —royal, official, military, civic, paternal. If the Germans are at present incapable of the stiffneckedness towards power shown by their fathers, the cause is, in part, the temper of chronic subordination contracted during their army service.
Mr. Dawson's German officers form a separate "social caste of a peculiarly rigid kind." "A deep social gulf" divides them from the " Civil ; " they detest manufacturers, trades- men, bankers, et id genus mane, and treat them all with "the same contumely and hauteur," particularly in "small garrison towns." This is mere moonshine. In Germany the ancient Aryan institution of caste flourishes, no doubt, with incomparable vigour, but the Army is by no means its chief stronghold. In "small garrison towns" the military stick to their "Casino," just as they would in England, for the reason that in such places there would be no local society for them to frequent. And in the capitals with a Court and resident nobility, they would gravitate by preference to the Palace and its surroundings. But in places with an opulent mercantile or industrial upper-class, all ranks of the military would necessarily be on terms with the city magnates. When an officer, be he Lieutenant or General, treats a Siemens, or a Krupp, or a Borsig, or a Bleichroder, with "contumely and hauteur,"—may we be there to see. In this department the author writes like an outsider; he is ill-informed on the favoured position of the military as such, in society, compared with that of civilians, on a supposed officer-worship by German women, on the feelings and customs of the popular "hero or demi-god " in regard to his clothes, and on other topics connected with these awful Drawcansirs and Bobadils of his imagination.
In Mr. Dawson's account of the sunny and shady sides of the German system of Patriarchal Government he is more accurate. He says that the multiplicity of State functions subjects civics life in the Empire to a restraint which reduces freedom of action to a minimum : and that generations must pass before the Ger- mans will acquire the capacity and wish to direct their local affairs. He praises the absolute self-mastery of German public servants—diplomatic, military, administrative—who never venture to criticise, even anonymously, the policy or proceedings of Government, and he calls their silence a "dignified reserve." He appears to sympathise with the loyalty of the State to its Civil servants (such is his language), —that is, the German system under which any unpolite treat- ment or criticism of an official in his public capacity is at once made the subject of a criminal prosecution at law. Prince Bismarck was the grand pedagogue in this branch of national education. About twenty years ago, he was said to have reached his seven thousandth personal prosecution for libel. Count Caprivi at first discarded, with various other Big- marckian aids to government, this method for sustaining Ministerial dignity and reputation; but he has now made some experiments in that direction, though with only partial
success. "Il y a des juges it Berlin," and they have been letting off the Beichskander's critics and caricaturists with fines where the Public Prosecutor had called for long terms of imprisonment. On the national method of checking disrespect to Royalty, on the secrecy of procedure enforced when ill-disposed persons are brought before the Law-courts
for crimes of this character, Mr. Dawson is silent ; nor does he enlarge on " informing " as a German fine art, although this practice, so sedulously encouraged by Prince Bismarck, has been elaborated in the Fatherland with a perfection com- parable to that exhibited by the debtors of the reign of Tiberius who figure in Tacitus.
Under the title of "Culture," these volumes give a large amount of information, general and statistical, on the educational apparatus of Germany, student life, the Press, and similar topics. The author contrasts 'the respect and gratitude" shown in high German places to men of learning, art, and science, with what he calls the English habit of withholding from them the honours and gratitude of the Crown and Government. Here we wonder if Mr. Dawson ever heard of Lord Tennyson, the Right Honourable Thomas Huxley, Lord Kelvin, Sir F. Leighton, Sir Michael Costa, Sir Charles Halle, Sir Arthur Sullivan, Sir Edward Burne-Jones, and so forth. And we should be glad to know the name of a single modern German "ruler in the realm of knowledge," not being by reason of his professional rank a State functionary, who has received any other recognition of his merits than a second- class star, or a title giving the recipient the right to stand in a corner at Court balls. Of the exclusion of the representatives of literature, art, and learning from German society, properly so-called, which is universal, absolute, and irremediable, the author gives no hint. He tells us that in Germany, and above all in Berlin, music is venerated, and that the popularity of Billow, Joachim, and Rubinstein is unbounded. Yes ; but who asks them to dinner ? In our own Court Circular we occasionally read an entry like this : "The Queen drove from Balmoral yesterday afternoon, and took tea with Madame Albani." Those who know Germany can estimate the shudder that would run through the Empire if the telegrams were to announce one morning: "Their Imperial and Royal Majes- ties drank tea yesterday with Madame Sembrich." On technical instruction the author is very fall, especially as regards the industrial schools of the Empire. "How comes it that Germany is able to compete with England," he asks, "in every part of the world ? " Answer,—Long hours and low wages ? No! Because she gives proper technical, manual training to the youths who are to be "the artisans, workpeople, and merchants of the future," and we do not. This is the familiar British myth, which, in spite of the warnings of Lord Armstrong and other experts, is from time to time paraded anew by some public speaker or writer. The typical German workman does not possess the skill of hand and eye of his English rival, and the dexterity which he does possess—a highly respectable quantum—is sot acquired in technical schools, to which he does not resort, but has been taught him more majorunz, in the old empirioal way, at home, or in the factory or workshop. For the technical instruction camel Mr. Dawson is not responsible, but his own moral consciousness may be the original seat of the statement proffered in one of his chapters, that the German mechanics may be heard discussing Schliemann's theories about Troy, or the tablets of Tell-el-Amarna, during their work. Of the effects on the national mind of the com- plex educational apparatus which he so fully describes, Mr. Dawson is provokingly reticent. His readers might like to know whether, for instance, the familiar conversation of German Counts, Hofraths, Commerzienraths, and so on, com- monly turns on, let us say, the Dipylon vases, the subjectivity of the non-ego, the symbolism of Lohengrin, the locus of the early home of the Aryans, and similar topics,—or if their talk is "of cattle " ?
On the Press, Mr. Dawson is not very complimentary. He considers that the German newspapers "are, at least, a ,quarter of a century behind the times," and is severe on their want of enterprise, celerity, and talent, on the pro- minence given by them to trashy incidents utterly unde- serving of notice, on the diffuseness of their style, the wretched insufficiency of their reports of Parliamentary de- bates, and their merely descriptive accounts of public meetings. The author does not comment on their way of repeating, day after day, year after year, the full titles, military, civil, or diplomatic, of every public German personage, however well known, whose name happens to occur in their columns. However, as Mr. Dawson observes, in Germany the abbrevia- tion or omission of people's " predicates " is apt to give dire offence, and he argues that allowances must be made for an institution which is "baited and badgered" by the State authorities all round, kept, in a word, in such a state of chronic fidget by prosecutions for libel—that is, for language which, in most other countries would be called mere milk-and-water .criticism—that some journals have to maintain batches of Sitzredakteure, or "sitting-editors," who are specially salaried to do the imprisonment business. Mr. Dawson forgets to ex- plain that the perils of the German Houndsditch Gazette and Eatan,swill Independant are aggravated by the generous elasticity of the Criminal Code, which facilitates the in- culpation, not only of personal libels, but also of remarks collectively offensive to classes (e.g., the officers of a regi- ment, or of the Army, the Custom-house, the Civil Service, Sm.), or to public or religious bodies. The author observes that a newspaper press thus situated can only have an inferior degree of influence,—he might have added that in the New Germany, a M. Bertin or a Mr. Delane, supported by a staff of contributors equipped with every advantage of education and social position, is an unthinkable phenomenon.
As regards the political order of ideas, Mr. Dawson remarks that it takes nothing less than a cyclonic event to shake the average German out of his usual lethargy. Looking to the eternal control of the police, which makes the con- stitutional right of public meeting and speaking a mockery, the wonder is that the Parliaments of the Empire ever get elected at all. Of the twenty parties, cliques, and caves of the Reichstag, the Social Democrats alone carry on their pro- paganda by systematic " stumping " in the British style. On German Socialism the author is very strong : he does justice to the extraordinary energy and intelligence of its leaders, though he should have laid more accent on the un- rivalled rhetorical and argumentative eloquence of Bebel, who, if he be the Olson of the Empire, is also its Demosthenes. Mr. Dawson thinks that Socialism has reached its present boiling- point because the higher social classes have been in the habit of treating their inferiors like dogs (we are translating his re- spectful euphemisms into their equivalents in plain language), and he says that if there is now a slight tendency amongst officials and others to allow that Socialists are "men and citizens," and that labour problems cannot be solved by the gag, the improvement is due to the enlightened example of the Emperor William II. The concluding chapters of the work, entitled the "Makers of Germany," deserve attention; and they contain several novelties which have escaped the notice of previous observers. Among them may be classed the information that the Emperor is popular with the Army,— a fact which may be bracketed with Mr. Dawson's statement that Prince Bismarck is musical. Of Friedrichsruh various new statistics are given by Mr. Dawson from personal know- ledge, and without the servility of tone proper to the deliver- ances of the domestic " reptile " when he writes of " ' L.'s ' nineteenth-century counterpart." Into the rivers of contro- versial mud which have flowed from that quarter on to the authors of the New Course he does not descend,—a dis- reputable volume of German history now, perhaps, closed.
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