BOOKS.

GERMANY AND ENGLAND.*

Tun brilliant author of these lectures, which had not been completely revised for the press at the time of his death, was Professor of Modern History in Queen's College, London. His mind was a rare combination, drawing upon the classics, in which he had read widely and deeply, on modern thought and modern languages, on a personal knowledge of Europe, and on political conviction which burned in him like a flame. He deplored his countrymen's ignorance of Germany, and in these lectures he set himself the task of repairing that ignorance so far as possible. The lectures as a whole—they were delivered early in 1913—read like a prophecy of the war that is now upon us. Mr. Cramb had an admiration for Germany, and we find him thinking that to raise his hat to Treitschke, the prototype of German Anglophobe Professors, was a perfectly natural tribute of respect. We do not follow him in this and some similar conclusions, but at all events the reason for his respect for Treitschke is clear enough; he revered a man great enough, as he thought, to pursue his argument to its natural culmination and never to run away from his own logic. Mr. Cramb condemned, on the other side, the unwillingness of Englishmen to face facts, or even to let their minds dwell on them seriously for a period. His own intellect was saturated in the lessons of history, and particu- larly in the bellicose metaphysic of modem German thinkers. His lucid analysis of the latter—by which he was fascinated, even while he dreaded it as entailing the end of the British Empire if Englishmen left their recognition of its meaning till too late—is one of the most concise and ardent pieces of exposition we have read for years. Like Wellington, he perceived that you must understand your enemy before you can fairly hope to beat him. Let our readers buy this little book and see for themselves what the nature of the inspiration is at the back of the German Weltpolitik. They will learn, in the smallest possible space, what Germany is fighting for, and what Britain is resisting. Militant German Professors, of course, flatter themselves that Germany stands for the arts of life, for civilization, earnestness, philosophy, and imagination. We know and respect the thoroughness of German scholarship, but we also know what Germans—or perhaps we should rather say Prussians—confuse with liberty. It is for a Europe saved from the German con- ception of an ordered State, a Europe saved from a diplomacy that recognizes no pledge which conflicts with German interests, a Europe saved from the incessant anxiety of militaristic threats and alarms—it is for these ends that we are fighting. If we do not win, liberty and political honour as Englishmen and Frenchmen understand and love them will be swept away from Europe for at least a generation.

Last week, in writing of the "German military mind," we

• Germany and England. By J. A. Cramb, M.A. London: John Murray. [ss. 6d. net.] quoted from the well-known book of General Friedrich von Bernhardi—a cheap edition of which has just been published (Edward Arnold, 2s. net) under the title of Germany and the War—and showed how he regards war not only as some- thing biologically inevitable, but as something having positive cultural and spiritual value. War, indeed, is ` " a duty." Along this line of thought the soldier haes/ollowee a little clumsily, in the tracks of Nietzscher'Weitschke. It

is above all to the importance of Trei9.c. ke—the historian who died in 1895—as the praphet-ebUToung Germany that

Mr. Cramb directs the att-4ition of his readers. Treitschke's works are hardt 1M-win outside Germany; not one of them, we belienrhas been translated into English. Yet to every Germen' who lets his fancy play with the greatness of his coeetry's future Treitschke's teaching is a Bible. When one of Treitschke's disciples expressed his regret that the master's writings were not read outside Germany, like 3fommsen's, Treitschke answered briefly and contentedly: "I write for Germans." Young Germany looks back with no regret to the Germany of Goethe or Beethoven. The land was then steeped in an idealism that was the negation of a grasping power. A comfortable, domestic, idyllic dream satisfied the people. The Germany of Leasing and Schiller was cosmopolitan ; and "humanity" was the first word of her philosophers. But power—empire—is the great desideratum now. Why should Britain and not Germany have this power? Why should Britain occupy such large and fruitful portions of the earth ? It is not as though Britain deserved to keep what she possesses. She stole it in the beginning, and holds it by an empty prestige. Mr. Cramb summarizes the spirit of Treitschke's teaching :- "It is very well for England to protest that she has no aggres- sive designs against Germany; England's mere existence as an empire is a continuous aggression. So long as England, the great robber-State, retains her booty, the spoils of a world, what right has she to expect peace from the nations ? England possesses everything and can do nothing. Germany possesses nothing and could do everything. What edict then, human or divine, enjoins us to sit still ? For what are England's title-deeds, and by what laws does she justify her possession P By the law of valour, indeed, but also by opportunity, treachery, and violence. In the time of Roon and Moltke the attitude of Germans when the question of enmity to England was discussed was always, 'Is it possible to land a German army upon English soil ? And, once landed there, how is it possible to bring it safely back again with its plunder to the shores of the Elbe and the Rhine ? ' What was argued was a problem of abstract strategy, rather than of political or national aim. A generation has passed. The heroes of the war of 1870 have one by one disappeared—Bismarck, Roon, Moltke, ManteuffeL That problem of strategy does still exist in Germany, but it occupies a much less prominent place than it occupied thirty or forty years ago. It seems to have solved itself during the last ten or fifteen years. It has become a secondary matter, and the quasi-historical form which the question of enmity to England now assumes in the minds of thousands of intellectual Germans is this : As the first great united action of the Germans as a people, when they became conscious of their power, was the overthrow of the Roman Empire, and ultimately, in Charlemagne and the Ottonides, the realization of the dream of Alaric—tho transfiguration of the world, the subversion of Rome, and the erection upon its ruins of a new State; so, in the twentieth century, now that Germany under the Hohenzollern has become conscious of her new life, shall her first great action be the over- throw of that empire most corresponding to the Roman Empire, which in the dawn of her history she overthrew ? In German history the old Imperialism begins by the destruction of Rome. Will the new Imperialism begin by the destruction of England ? "

In a pregnant footnote it is pointed out how a kind of pro- fessorial fanfare preceded every German war of the last

hundred-years :— It is impossible in Germany to ignore the force of literary and academic ideas. Just such a series of irrelevant and inflammatory declamation, partly the work of the Tugendimmd, partly the work of men like Arndt and even Stein, preceded the rising against Napoleon ; and in a later decade just such a series preceded the war against Austria and the war against France. The causes of the wars of 1866 and 1870 can be so treated as to appear the work of professors and historians. What is Droysen's ' History' but a pamphlet in six volumes in which Prussia stands out as the model State ? And the 'French Revolution' of Sybel is a counter- part of the writings of Droysen and Treitschke in its arraignment of the French nation."

If it is right for Germany to make war—and that may be taken for granted on the strength of such teaching as has poured from the Prussian school of history—the only inhibition on war that could possibly have operated for long was a conviction of Britain's ability to hold her own. Mr.

Cramb makes it clear that the incapacity of Britain is a theme which has been gradually permeating all classes of the German nation :— " England's supremacy is an unreality, her political power is as

1kb, hollow as her moral virtues ; the one an arrogance and pretence, the other hypocrisy. She cannot long maintain that baseless supremacy. the sea she is rapidly being approached by other Powers ; her except by immigration, are almost stationary, and her tion debases still further her resources. Her decline may be no war. The display of power may be ci after 1900, like Venice after 1500, will

very immi is certain. T enough, and Eng gradually atrophy,in torpor. An England insensibly -.. ed the encroachments of an weakened by brutalizatioff77fflilt

ever-increasing alien element, diseasa&or criminal, and, by con- cession on concession without, sinkingrWfi- subject province though nominally free, whilst Canada, South Afri5.Australia, New Zealand, carves out each its own destiny—such ail ngland is easily conceived. Who is to succeed her? It may not be Ger- many ; some Power it must be. But if Germany were to inherit the sceptre which is falling from her nerveless bands . . .?"

War, indeed, was inevitable if the clumsiness of some new Graftons, Norths, or Grenvilles did not serve the German purpose of giving Germany what she wanted without fighting for it. The clumsiness is Germany's own, as it has turned out. She has appealed to arms, but did not calculate how many nations would be involved in her terrible challenge.

The criticism of British hollowness and incapacity touches much more than our physical ability as a nation. One school of German thought influenced by Nietzsche and Dahn, and perhaps by Mommsen and Curtius, asserts that our rule in India is a mere bankruptcy of imagination. Instead of look- ing on India as a land of idealism and religious mysticism, we grossly insult her intelligence with opium in one hand and the Bible in the other. We are indeed a nation of shop- keepers with the souls of shopkeepers. We have ceased even to be soldiers. Treitschke says that England has never had a national Army since the time of Cromwell. If India is sacred, Egypt is scarcely less so; but we have merely vul- garized Egypt, creeping into possession of it through the weakness of France, like a fox into a farmstead. Another school of critics assails various aspects of our national life— our morals, our jurisprudence (did not our lawyers prove their ignorance of law by their criticisms of the trials of British spies in Germany P), our Universities (second-rate intellectual institutions), and the Anglican Church, the most provincial of all the creeds born of the Reformation. Again, there is the school of military critics, who have a profound contempt for our Army and for all the "lessons" it supposes itself to have learnt in South Africa. Did not British soldiers surrender there after suffering minute losses? In fine, Britain is a degenerate country, a ridiculous bubble only

waiting to be pricked. Even the women have gone mad and entered upon the hysterical courses of militant suffragism.

When such a nation makes proposals for limiting armaments or for a "naval holiday," what can it mean except that it is tired of the struggle and actually unequal to carrying it on longer ?

This Britain, this Venice-Carthage of the modern world, is, in fact, doomed to disappear, and it is only a question by whose band the coup de grace shall be delivered. No wonder that Treitschke, the prose poet laureate of Bismarckism, should be beloved, since he indicates that the hand nerved for he work is the hand of Germany. To end such a pretentious sham would be a service to the world that might be called a holy work. Mr. Cramb says of Treitschke's reflections on war :—

" No English historian or thinker has spoken of war quite as Treitschke has spoken of it. I do not recollect a single passage in his writings in which the conventional regrets are expressed, or where conventional phrases such as 'the scourge of mankind; the barrier to human progress,' occur as descriptions of war. From an early period in his literary career, on the other hand, phrases of a quite different order abound in his writings, phrases in which war appears, if not as the supreme felicity of mankind: at least as a great factor in the onward strife towards perfection ; whilst any attempt at its abolition is characterized as unwise and immoral."

Let us repeat that the German, though he would impose Prussian militarism on Europe, does not think of himself as an overweening autocrat. Mr. Cramb says :— " Treitschke has defined the aim of Germany, and Treitschke's definition, which has been taken up by his disciples, is this : That just as the greatness of Germany is to be found in the governance of Germany by Prussia, so the greatness and good of the world is to be found in the predominance there of German culture, of the German mind, in a word, of the German character. This is the - ideal of Germany, and this is Germany's role as Treitschke saw it in the future. For, observe, this world-dominion of which Germany dreams is not simply a material dominion. Germany is not blind to the lessons inculcated by the Napoleonic tyranny. Force alone, violence or brute strength, by its mere silent presence or by its loud manifestation in war, may be necessary to establish this dominion ; but its ends are spiritual. The triumph of the Empire will be the triumph of German culture, of the German world- vision in all the phases and departments of human life and energy, in religion, poetry, science, art, politics, and social endeavour. The characteristics of this German world-vision, the benefits which its predominance is likely to confer upon mankind, are, a German would allege, truth instead of falsehood in the deepest and gravest preoccupations of the human mind ; German sincerity instead of British hypocrisy ; Faust instead of Tartuffe. And whenever I have put to any of the adherents of this ideal the further question: Where in actual German history do you find your guarantee for the character of this spiritual empire; is not e true role of Germany cosmopolitan and peaceful ; are not Hdrder and Goethe its prophets ? ' I have met with one invariable answer: The political history of Germany, from the accession of Frederick" 1740 to the present hour, has admittedly no meaning unless it be regarded as a movement towards the establishment of a world-empire, with the war against England as the necessary preliminary. Similarly the curve which, during the last century and a half, Germany has traced in religion and metaphysical thought, from Kant and Hegel to Schopenhauer, Strauss and Nietzsche, has not less visibly been a movement towards a newer world-religion, a newer world-faith. That fatal tendency to cosmopolitanism, to a dream-world, which Heine derided and Treitschke deplores, does, indeed, still remain, but how trans- figured!'" We said that Mr. Cramb's brilliant survey reads like a prophecy. Towards the end of it be writes:— " England, indeed, desires peace; England, indeed, it is certain, will never make war upon Germany ; but how is the youth of Germany, the youth of that nation great in arts as in war, to acquiesce in the world-predominance of England? With what thoughts are they to read the history and the literature of their country ? If, from love of peace or dread of war, Germany sub- mits, it would seem as if her great soldiers had fought in vain, as if the long roll of her battles had passed like an empty sound, as if the Great Elector and Frederick, Stein and Scharnhorst and Bismarck had schemed in vain, as if her thinkers had thought their thoughts and her poets had dreamed their dreams not less in vain. But if, on the other hand, Germany has not declined from her ancient valour the issue is certain, and a speedy issue. It is war."

War—and so it is! We can only be thankful that the inevitable has come at a moment almost as propitious as could have been chosen by those who believe from the bottoms of their hearts that the gospel of Treitschke is a horrid and

cruel delusion.