TOPICS OF TILE DAY.
THE GOLDEN WEDDING AT BERLIN.
.ENOUGH of pens are hymning the grandeur of the Berlin ceremonial of Wednesday, and we will venture to say, amidst the chorus, a word on the other side. Some slave or other, as the German Chancellor would say, were he likely to read these words, must remind us of mortality at every feast. It was quite fitting, as Germans are accustomed to celebrate such anniversaries, which have not for them, as they have for Englishmen, something of unreal sentiment, that all Germany should assemble to honour the Golden Wedding of the Sove- reign who at least consented that Germany should be, and chose out the men destined to effect her consolidation. We have no rebuke for loyalty to a national standard, however effusive or splashy in its forms. A great nation does not necessarily diminish its own honour in heaping honour on its Head. But, nevertheless, to us, there is something in the form of this pageant, imposing as it was, exceedingly bizarre, and suggestive of a grand stage-scene, in which there is no element of durability. The mighty monarch who could conquer Europe, but who was upheld by his aides-de- camp as he returned his thanks for the congratulations of an Empire ; the Emperor worshipped by a crowd of Kings and by millions of his people, who yet cannot drive, on his supreme day, through the streets of his own capital without elaborate precautions to guard his life ; the group of Sovereigns, so gorgeous and so obeisant, all willing to exalt the dignity of their master, yet all feeling keenly that this dignity is an amalgam of dignities subtracted from their own ; the crowd of conquering Generals who have no equals, and who yet never believe that Germany is safe, and strain her endurance to make her ever more prepared ; the bowing cluster of diplo- matists, of whom every one adores the chief figure in the ceremonial, and of whom every one but one would exult if the idol were overthrown ; the mighty collec- tion of powers, amid which the People alone, the base of all this, is unrepresented, or represented only by "a few men in black, shrinking out of sight into corners,"—all this has for us, who wish a Germany united but free, something of unreality, staginess, and anachronism. It is as if some wealthy potentate had chosen in our time to revive the Middle Ages ; as if Lord Eglinton's Tournament were trans- acting itself on an Imperial scale for the second time, and with no prescience of the blow to come in the future from the un- known Bank. If Germany is grand, it is because Germany is modern ; because she has applied scientific thought to war, be- cause her whole people can act together, because she has been edu- cated at least sufficiently to perceive the strength that may spring from effacing individualism, because, when need arises, she can bid all her dignitaries hold their peace before the competent brain. And yet what is this Emperor, what are these Kings, Grand Dukes, Field-Marshals, nobles, and the rest, if they are not individualities, over-developed, over-prominent, with over- much claim to exist, even at others' expense ? The People is Sovereign even in Germany, and armed, too ; yet is there one of the magnificent 'cortege which passed before its master in the White Hall whose greatness is not a deduction from the people, either in money or in happiness, or in the inherent right of popular self-government ? How long, then, can it last ? How long can the foremost people in the world be visible chiefly through the grandeur of an image to which the nation is only pedestal ? Are not the banners, and the devices, and the uniforms, and the stately men them- selves, once all so real and true, now symbols of beliefs, and manners, and political thoughts which have passed away not to return again, and therefore symbols which one day will excite the unreasoning hatred which man every- where is foolish enough to waste on the symbols he has learned to disbelieve? No scene of earthly grandeur can be con- ceived more splendid than the reception in the White Hall, none has seemed to speak more plainly of enduring majesty and power, since, amid a similar scene, Louis XVI. received the Notables of his kingdom. Germany will not paes away, nor, we trust, will its power among mankind, but this method of the expression of both, this confusion of pomp with greatness, this revelation of majesty through bar- baric ceremonial, this effort to concentrate the multiform life of a nation in a palace,—how is that to last for ever, when even in Prussia the thought of the mechanician who rearranged the rifle has been the origin of power, and a Swedish poethas done as much to evoke loyalty to Germany in the German people as all her lines of Kings? May not the mecliwval scene which. depended on railways for its occurrence, and was described so instantly by telegraph, be the culminating exhibition of an order of things about to pass away ? When the nation which the Emperor has so greatly helped to make, celebrates in 1920 its Golden Wedding, may not the obscure man in black, who this time "shrank into corners," ashamed to break the bright- ness of such a coup be seated on the throne, the heir of all. that has been real in this grandeur ? The Hohenzollern would not smile at the query, though his courtiers might, for vast age has made the Emperor meditative, and he does not forget that M. Grevy receives the Cardinals in the seat of Louis XIV., under the Concordat forced by Napoleon on the Pope, and that France, which is real, has survived the disappearance of the CEil de Bceuf."
Germany is a reality, and as we trust and believe, a durable one, but its present organisation has a weakness which, out- side Germany, is scarcely yet perceived. The system on. which it is based, and which is so admired by all who do not suffer by it, owes its strength mainly to compression from without. Russia and France have been the German Emperor's best friends. Prince Bismarck dreads the Liberals and the Socialists and the enmity of France, and the possible enmity of Russia, "on whose side we have no frontier," but it is the powerlessness or the friendship of those two enemies which he has most cause to apprehend. Let France but disarm or com- promise with him, let Russia be dissolved or transformed by the strange internal movement with which she seems to be already bursting, and the buttresses of the Empire as it exists, the military Empire, always in uniform, always ready for battle, will be found to have been withdrawn. It is- because she fears that these two may shake hands across- her, because she may be invaded by two millions of men, because she is always in danger of an unspeakable catastrophe, that Germany bears all this compression, sacri- fices the ends of life to drill, exalts the military caste into a perilous loneliness till in the White Hall the black-coats shrink abashed, and exults to feel that her Sovereign speaks to her Representatives from the stone throne with its feet of cannon-balls. No nation not so menaced would so sacrifice its higher self, when quite conscious of that higher self, and least of all the German, whose ideal, when all is said, is not himself as corporal, but himself as paterfamilias, and who, everywhere out of Germany, prefers the country farm, or the city ex- change, or the savant's lecture-room, to the most enticing of barrack-yards. The compression will be withdrawn some. day, be it by victory, or by revolution abroad, or even by diplomacy; and then, deprived of its supporting buttresses, not Germany itself, but the System of Germany, the system of which the scene in the White Hall is the apotheosis, will slowly or rapidly, but visibly and for ever, crumble down. The light- house is very tall and very carefully repaired, and must, while the storms threaten, be most diligently maintained ; but if storms cease, why spend and suffer that lighthouses should be strong? No man, be he never so proud of armour, will wear it in. summer weather, when to be prosperous he must plough ; and Germany, relieved of her fear—a well-founded fear, though elevated into a bogey—will yet clothe herself in the civil suit, which will be her symbol that all which the mighty ceremonial of Wednesday typified, the honour to be paid to the sword, the worship of grade so needful in an army, the reverence for autocracy—for without regulated autocracy what can an army do ?—has passed away from her life. A Court ceremonial in Berlin has been this week the grand event of Europe. One wonders if the stately old man who was its centre, and who, men. say, standing on the very verge of human life, and remembering so much,—the insolent Italo-Frenchman master in his palace, he himself master in the palace of the Bourbons,—some- times utters strange things about the order of mankind which is passing away, sees the vanity of that? Vassal Kings hurry- ing up by imprisoned steam, a procession of Princes recorded by drilled lightning, Charlemagne's Cour Pleine painted by subjugated sunbeams ;—there can be no durability in such a mingling of the old world and the new, though to keep it all in its splendour and its strength, they are this week compelling "the black-coats shrinking into corners" to tax tobacco, and beer, and bread.
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