CHAPTER XIV

IS IT THE PEOPLE'S WAR?

German Socialism

German Unity-A Reverse Political System - Business Men without Political Influence - A Voice from the People - The German War Lord.

IN America there is no greater conflict of opinion than over the question of the relations of the German people to the present war. There are those who declare most emphatically that when the German people once understand this war there will be revolution in Germany, uprising of the socialists, and the sure overthrow of the Hohenzollern dynasty.

Such opinions are not well based, and their authors do not understand the German temperament, the principles of German government, German organization, or German Socialism.

Socialism in Germany is neither of the destructive order of that in Russia, nor of the wild varieties found in America; nor has it even the order of the Socialism of England. Twenty years ago the Socialism of Germany might be recorded as against the invasion of Belgium, and the bonds of Socialism existing between Bel

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gium, France, and Germany might have interfered with the war programme.

But Socialism in Germany has passed the stage of labor-agitation. Indeed, it has been transformed in the reign of the present Kaiser from agitation against capitalism within the empire to agitation for the expansion of Germany in the territory of its neighbors throughout the world, that German labor may, through German arms, enter into and possess the land without. German Socialism is thus allied with German militarism, and it has also become the respectable party of opposition in the Reichstag. The middle classes of Germany of late years have voted for Socialistic candidates whenever they disagreed with the government. It is the party of protest and of opposition. It is a party of the empire, not of any world socialistic movement.

Germany is thoroughly knit together in support of its government and its Kaiser. The German people do not seek a constitutional government like England, or a republican form of government like France or the United States. They believe their situation and safety in the middle of Europe call for a more autocratic form of government, and one not too quickly responsive to popular sentiment.

Germany was made by Bismarck and the armies of Von Moltke supporting the Hohenzollern dynasty. This made Prussia the center of Germany industrially, financially, and as a military power, and at the heart and seat of power, in both industry and finance, sits the same dynasty. The Emperor is the center of industry, finance, and military power, - three degrees of empire, each distinct in itself, but each intertwined with the others, but so intertwined that the word of power, command and influence comes down from the military seat of power through finance and into industry. Industry does not speak back through the powers of finance to the military center. The flow of the German dispensation of power or of governmental organization runs downward from the Kaiser. No power goes up from the people or industry or finance to the war lord at the center.

The Germans know no other system of government. Outside of Prussia, in the more than thirty states of Germany, there was the local reign. Now over all is the reign of the Kaiser. The present generation has seen a united Germany become great among the nations of the earth. The English-speaking people cannot appreciate

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the feudalism and the fealty of the German people to their war lord. They say, "Are not the German people great thinkers; do they not know that the power of government is from the governed?" It is inconceivable to them that the Germans should have a reverse system.

My last word from Germany was with an American lady who has been more than one hundred days nursing the wounded from the battleline, and she, singular as it may appear, assisted on both sides of that battle-line. She assisted to dress the wounds of French soldiers where the lacerations of shrapnel had broken one entire side of a human system, face, eye, ear, jaw, arm, leg; yet that soldier lived. She dressed wounds where more than twenty bullets pierced a single human frame. Yet that soldier will go back to the front. French boys in their 'teens had died in her arms at the hospital, the hospital where thousands of wounded pass through every month, and she had taken back to the parents in Paris the dying message. She had been in the German and the French trenches on the line of battle. She had crossed the lines and been under arrest. She had seen the horrible picture of freight-loads of German corpses on German railroads, corpses unhelmeted, with uncovered

faces, but in boots and uniform, tied like cordwood in bunches of three and standing upright on their way to the lime-kilns. She had nursed the wounded German soldier in his delirium, crying in German, which she well understood, over the horrors which still pursued him as he remembered the face of the wife and saw the agony of the children as he stood in line and by direction of his superior officer shot the husband dead. He moaned in his delirium over the picture. The faces of the wife and children haunted him, but he cried out that his superior officer had ordered him to do it; and she said, "No, these people are not responsible; the dogs of war have driven them as sheep into the slaughterpens. They are beaten, but fight for the Fatherland. It is their duty and they obey."

And how has it all come about? Simply thus: The Saxon was a Saxon, the Bavarian was a Bavarian; each suddenly found himself a German and part of a world-power. Bismarck and Von Moltke had a policy for the Hohenzollerns; it was a united Germany, and they left it a defensive Germany.

There was not in the brain of Bismarck or of Von Moltke, or of the Emperor under whom they prosecuted the wars against Austria, Denmark,