GERMANY: THE WELDING OF A WORLD-POWER.* Tars writer is highly
esteemed in the United States as an authority on German affairs. After service with the Saxon Army in the Franco-German War and a literary interlude at Chicago, he represented the American Associated Press in Berlin, whence he was expelled as " an obnoxious foreigner" for correspondence reflecting on the Kaiser and on the atti- tude of the Imperial Government in the Spanish-American War. Since then his contributions to American and German periodicals have brought him considerable repute, and we may say that his present book is as good as his passport. He is encyclopaedic and brilliant; while, touching his impartiality, his treatment by the Prussian police has left no apparent sting behind.
Herr von Schierbrand has his stumbles, as when, e.g., he puts the Imperial revenues at about twice their actual figure, or pretends that the Supreme Court of Leipsic (whose members, by the way, are not nominated by the Kaiser) is accessible to suggestions from Berlin : the style in which that Tribunal quashed Bismarck's prosecution of Dr. Geffeken proved the German Judges of Appeal to be as above suspicion as our own. Flatly contradicted by every fact of the case is the idea that the Reichstag is " glaringly subservient to the will and pleasure of an autocrat," whose " well-nigh mesmeric influence on the mind and imagination" of that body habitually forces it to legislate in conformity with his dictates. A House with eighteen separate groups is, in the nature of things, inaccessible to pressure of that sort, and so the German Parliament is more untrammelled by Government authority than our own. Furthermore, the Committees of the House pull to pieces the Bills laid before them with a -vigour unknown in other Assemblies,—the annual Budget parings are on such a drastic scale that if equivalent emendations were suggested in Westminster their bare mention would make an English Chancellor of the Exchequer's hair stand on end.
A chapter, "Prussian Hegemony," annihilates the absurd foreign opinion "that Prussia virtually means Germany, and that the remainder of the Empire is a mere appendage sans importance and sans vital powers " : it shows that when our newspapers report that the Berlin police have sent this or that order to Stuttgart or Gotha, that the Saxon Government has received this or that injunction or broad hint from the Wilhelmstrasse, they are printing nonsense. Prussia can, of course, exercise moral pressure on her confederated neigh- bours, and she can usually obtain a majority in the Bundesrath, but the King's powers as Kaiser are not those of a President of the United States. He is tightly fettered by the Constitution of the Empire, which does not allow him a Parliamentary veto, and various attempts of William II. to extend his paramount rights have ended in his retreat before * Germany : the Welding of a World-Power. By Wolf yea Schierbrand. London Grant Richards. 110s. 6d. net.] the plain signs of disapproval with which the other rulers and their subjects have confronted his pretensions. The fact that the average monarchical German is now thoroughly devoted to the idea of Deutschland fiber dies does not prevent the existence of veins of regional sentiment which are still far from the vanishing-point. The Borussophobia of the South Germans is at timed perceptible enough ; strong language is applied to "the pike in the carp pond" whose Bavarian friends talk freely of "the damned Prussians." If the import- ance of the survival of certain phases of Particularimus is exaggerated by our author, he comes to the correct con- clusion that Germany " is steadily, if slowly, going in the direction of complete national consolidation." Let a foreign complication threaten, and Europe will see proofs that the new German rocker de bronze is not founded on sand.
England has her Imperialists, Italy her Irredentists, America her Expansionists, and Germany has her Pan-Germans. Until lately the dreams of an " All-Germany " were hardly perceptible except in the black-red-gold colours worn by the students of Bonn or Heidelberg, or at meetings of athletic and singing societies. The agitators for the return of the lost tribes are now represented by a separate Society with its special organisation and Atlas. According to the idealistic wording of its official programme, the Pan-German Federation " has for object the revival and preservation of German nationalistic sentiment, ideals and customs, all round the earth." Translated into vulgar prose, this means, as our author shows, the reunion " under the aegis or under the direct sway of the Imperial Crown of Germany of all those populations of Teutonic blood"—Austrian, Russian, Flemish, and Swiss—which from various historic causes have strayed from the national fold. If in our author's opinion this policy in regard to the avulsa Imperii belongs to cloudland, be attaches some importance to the scheme of the Pan- Germans for planting South America with independent German colonies enjoying autonomy under the Imperial flag. This idea may be popular, but the German Government has more than once categorically affirmed that it harbours no such programme. Graf von Billow would probably shake his head at the writer's approaching millennium when, after the disappearance of the " ridiculous Chauvinism " now pre- dominant, Germany, England, and the United States, bound together in invulnerable Triple Alliance, will be "the dictators of the world." Here the author's faith rests on what he considers the proved certainty that the Kaiser is, at bottom, an Anglophil, and entertains no projects inimical, in however faint a degree, to the Americans or ourselves.
The German artisan of this volume is obedient, well behaved, and sober; but compared with the corresponding American he is physically weak, dawdles, is wanting in initiative, invention, skill, and devoted to clumsy, inefficient tools. His " exasperating " slowness and unpunctuality are seen, e.g., in the painters and builders, who in a day of fourteen hours only do half or two-thirds of the work done by the American in eight hours. When we read that this is partly because in Germany the high price of the chief food-stuffs prevents the worker from buying sufficient food with his normal wage of, say, eighteen to forty marks a week, the present writer demure entirely to the author's premises. Thanks to the prevalence of excellent restaurants, the Arbeiter can always get a fuller and better- cooked dinner for threepence than can be procured on the Thames or Clyde for a shilling, while he obtains such extras as locomotion, cigars, theatrical and musical pleasure, mendings, casual medical help, &c., for a mere nothing. On the credit side of his balance-sheet further stand the vast advantages accruing to him from the system called by its author, Bismarck, "practical Christianity,"—a system which, in spite of Mr. Chamberlain's recent optimistic hints, will long be mere Zukunftsmusik for ourselves. Under the fourfold Imperial machinery of accident, sickness, invalid, and old- age insurance, the German worker is guaranteed against the evil consequences of some of the worst vicissitudes of his life, a comfort for which he practically pays nothing.
The average Briton seems to think that if his under- wear, velvets, lenses, lamp-chimneys, paper, picture-cards, Huddersfield and Bradford dyes, and so forth are mostly "made in Germany," it is because the ignorant old methods of apprenticeship followed here have been replaced beyond the Rhine by a scientific system of manual training in the operations concerned. As a. matter of fact, the normal recipient of German technical instruction is not the artisan, but the budding manufacturer or merchant, who, unlike his American or English com- petitor, first goes to College, and then, taught by "a three years' course at an industrial or technical high school, and by extensive travels abroad, keeping his eyes and his ears open the while," attains a lasting insight into the theory and practice of his eventual business very different from that furnished by the rule-of-thumb. The recent leaps and bounds of German foreign commerce are traced by our author not only to the national " patience, frugality, and adaptability," and linguistic knowledge, but also to the curious fact that the exporting houses of the Empire, unlike so many of their British rivals, do not disdain the natural paths to success in transmarine trade. The German firm sends out a young relative, or clerk, to pass some years in the countries whose custom is in question, where he positively studies the wants of the local purchaser, keeping his home employer informed of the same. Our own parallel procedure for the conquest of foreign markets is familiar enough from recent Consular Reports. Be the place Smyrna, or Bender Abbas, or Carlicas, it is our habit to tempt the local buyer by samples of goods fitted for the tastes and necessities of Bond Street and Brighton, and catalogued in English lists priced in English money, the whole business of puffing and selling being entrusted to a " traveller" who, as a rule, hardly knows a word of the language of the people whose patronage he has to solicit.
If the comments in this volume on German " society" have somewhat of a plebeian flavour, palatial topics like the daily life of the Kaiserin and the bad fit of her gowns are well and gaily handled. Sympathetic and fairly correct is the por- traiture of William II. as a pattern of virtuous endeavour, with his mixed autocratic and progressive ambitions, his rain of mottoes and speeches, his wide-reaching culture. The snubs which his Imperial Majesty brings upon himself are well illustrated in a notable chapter on German literature and art, which describes his hopeless attempts to bar the road to the new Sturm and Drang ideals in painting, sculpture, and the drama by an expensive personal patronage of the representa- tives of the traditional school of " tame mediocrity." The Monarch may publicly brand the movement of "art for art's sake " as " harmful" and " despicable," he may annul the award of the " Schiller Prize " to Hauptmann's Sunken Bell, he may spend £300,000 from his own purse in furnishing the Avenue of Victory with a marble array of his ancestry carved in accordance with his own fancies,—the wind of Berlin taste continues to blow where it listeth. The writer's remarks on the characteristics and influence of the mystical Swiss colourist Bocklin, and of his allies the portrait-painter Lenbach and the weird symbolist Stuck, show a. cultivated critical sense. To all his notes of admiration we cannot, however, say ditto, least of all when we read that the modern Giovanni-Bellini-and- water, Max Klinger, is " the most imaginative and impressive" painter of the new free individualising school. Of the secessionists of the " Youngest Germany " species in the drama, poetry, and romance Herr von Schierbrand is a warm defender, even to the length of admiring the vulgarian, unsavoury stories of Kretzer and Tovote.
Thoughts of Tammany Hall have probably suggested the author's well-deserved praise of the street-cleaning of Berlin, where the order and cleanliness that make Germany "the neatest and tidiest" country in the world reach their maximum. When will the visitor to London be able to write that, whether in Belgravia or suburbia, " there are no orange- peels, no waste-paper, no animal refuse, no empty lunch-bags encumbering the streets " ? Will our Aediles ever over- take the ideal state of things achieved in Berlin, where there are no stinks, roaring " hooligans," or blackguard boys scrawl- ing indecent words on walls and pavements ? Magisterial efficacy is not, however, the reason why in street trees, house gardens, and flower balconies the cities of Germany stand alone, or the cause of the primacy of the German beggar, who is always tidy, and keeps his face and bands properly washed.
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