THE NEWEST PRUSSIAN TRIAL.
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THE trial of young officers for gambling which for some days past has been amusing or shocking Berlin is of some, it may be of great, political importance. It shows that the dry rot which has somehow got into the great machine called Prussia has gone deeper than was suspected. The essence of the Prussian system, the source of its amazing strength in the past, is the existence all over the kingdom of a caste of landlords, who were willing at all times and in all ways to devote themselves and their families to the service of the State. They were ready, not only to die for the King, but to lead for him in poverty lives of strenuous labour. Trained for genera- tions to hard lives, traditionally proud, and holding com- merce in scorn, they sought only position, social rank as we call it, and that condition granted they were willing to pass their whole lives in service, almost without pay. On allowances hardly larger than those of Catholic priests in poor countries, they filled the Army, and worked all day, and every day, to make it efficient ; or entering the Civil Service, worked in it as rising barristers work, or good clergymen in the East End of London, amply rewarded if only the work went well, and their superiors distributed at rare intervals a frugal approval. Led by a family of their own kind, harder even than themselves, and as efficient, they turned their State into a machine, which for a hundred and fifty years has amazed Europe, not only with the quality, but the quantity, of its outturn. It was a State no larger than Belgium which sus- tained and triumphed in the Seven Years' War. As the State expanded the numbers of the caste increased, but the new men took their impress from the conquerors, as the immigrants into Yorkshire took theirs from the few hereditary inhabitants whom they found in the dales, and it was not till this generation that any change became so much as a subject of discussion. With the payment of the Indemnity, however, the new prosperity that followed for all who employed capital, and the slow but ceaseless shrinkage in agricultural prices, a new and subtle mischief introduced itself into the system. The great but poor aristocracy which fed the great machine found itself poorer than ever amidst ever-increasing wealth, resented its new position excessively, began spending on a larger scale on the externals of life, and for the first time sought by every means to increase its income. Its members clamoured for Protection, which they ultimately obtained; they borrowed money to make improvements ; they speculated, often unsuccessfully ; and they set up fac- tories, with the result that experienced factory managers purchased them from them half-ruined concerns and made fortunes out of derelict properties. The younger members already in active service felt the same impulses and experienced the same pressure. Poorer than any dignified class ever was before—for though in the eighteenth century our own nobles were poor, they never fell to the Prussian pecuniary level—they besieged their families for larger allowances, they commenced a great hunt for heiresses, and a good many despairing of other- . wise reconciling their pecuniary wants with their positions in the Service, took to gambling for what to them were high stakes. If we are not mistaken, we have ourselves three times recorded at intervals of about a decade severe orders by the Emperors against the rapid increase of this vice, orders which were probably obeyed, but in barracks only. At last the bottom has been reached. and we find young officers of the best families, one a scion of a mediatised house, entitled by precedent to reckon himself above the law, who have set up a gambling hell, possibly not with the intention of cheating—as the police at first suspected—but certainly with the intention of making money without too many scruples as to means. A portion, in fact, of the great reservoir which supplies the Services has become tainted, and will, if it cannot be purified, cor- rupt the remainder. The effect of that will be, first, a relaxation of the moral fibre which has always given vigour and nerve to the Prussian Services ; secondly, a great increase of expenditure, the State itself recognising that part of the evil is due to an unwise parsimony which does not, since the ideas of the generation have so much changed, allow to the servants of the State even a bare livelihood ; and thirdly, an increasing reluctance among the able and ambitious to devote their lives to State work. This is said to be perceptible even now, and if it were not kept down by a traditionary prejudice which holds all other means of gaining a living discreditable, would become so widespread that the State service might become the refuge for inferior men,—a danger which was once quite perceptible both in this country and in India, when it was roughly arrested by the system of competi- tive examination. That system has several grave draw. backs, but at all events this merit, that it does not suit fools.
The Emperor may, we fancy, be trusted to deal with the evils revealed in this trial with some severity. He is a surgeon who still believes that actual cautery is occa- sionally a useful expedient, and he will have the support of all fathers of families who do not want to see their sons ruined by dissipation, or tempted to increase the already frightful number of Prussian suicides ; but there is another evil produced by a trial like this which his Majesty may find it more difficult to deal with. This is the increase of the distrust and dislike between classes. It is very difficult for an outsider ever to be certain on such a point, but all the evidence which reaches us tends to show that the dislike and envy of the aristocracy which is felt both by the bourgeoisie and the proletariat in Germany has of late years rather increased than diminished. The prosperous resent contumely, the edu- cated sneer at pretension, and those who are neither educated nor prosperous ask whether their unfortunate position, of which they are newly conscious, may not be due to the social regime of privilege. The convinced Socialists, now a fourth of the community, spread this idea in every beershop, until it has made a pronounced difference in the tone of the commonalty, and renders criticism on every aristocratic scandal indescribably bitter. The upper class in Prussia is probably, on the whole, rather better than the lower classes, more self-restrained, more punctiliously honest, and more virtuous in the English sense ; but the lower classes do not believe it, and their disbelief increases the chance of an ultimate great upheaval. The revolution may never come, for we have waited long since the day when Heine obviously believed it was at hand, but a real antagonism of classes can disorganise a State without a cataclysmal revolution. No soldier in Prussia will dis- obey—discipline has entered the blood too strongly for that—but an Army in which a large proportion of the men despise the officers, criticise the Generals, and resent the privileges which hourly impress upon them their own un- privileged position would not be the bar of steel with which the Hohenzollerns have hitherto crushed their foes. It would be the Army of Louis XIV., not the Army which von Moltke directed from his map-room. It was easy to dislike the old Junker with his cast-iron ideas, his rigidly thrifty ways, and his immoveable arrogance, but it was as impossible to despise him as to despise a crowbar or an oaken beam. It is, however, quite possible to despise the Junker who, though as arrogant as ever, regards money as the chief good, and will stoop to any mode of making it, who is proud of his caste, but for a few guineas will associate with the lowest of man- kind, and who, while eternally preaching probity to his in- feriors, places himself in a situation in which a great police officer, sorely against his will, thinks himself compelled to bring against him an accusation of cheating. The comments of the man in the street watching such things grow spiteful, and though the man in the street cannot in Prussia overthrow governments, he can, and does, influence Parliament to vote against the " Agrarians " who want to tax his food, and can refuse further extensions of the most costly divisions of the Army. Germans are not Frenchmen, fortunately for Germany, but they are not incapable of feeling either envy or contempt, and as they have based their system upon social suporiorities an increase either of envy or contempt in the lower ranks must make the system shake.
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