THEODOR KIPP, ALOIS KNOEPFLER, Professor of History of Art, KARL LAMPRECHT, Professor of History, Leipsic. MAX LIEBERMANN, JOSEF MAUSBACH, Professor of Roman Catholic Theology, Münster. EDUARD MEYER, Professor of History, Berlin. WILHELM HERRMANN, Professor of Protestant Theology, Marburg. WILHELM OSTWALD, Professor of Chemistry, Leipsic. ALBERT PLEHN, Professor of Medicine, Berlin. ALOIS RIEHL, Professor of Philosophy, Berlin. MAX RÜBNER, Professor of Medicine, Berlin. AUGUST SCHMIDLIN, Professor of Sacred History, Münster. ALBERT NEISSER, Professor of Medicine, Breslau. BRUNO PAUL, Director of School of Applied GEORG REICKE, Professor of Archæology, Halle. GUSTAV VON SCHMOLLER, Professor of National Economy, Berlin. WALTER NERNST, Professor of Physics, Berlin. MAX PLANCK, Professor of Physics, Berlin. PROF. MAX Reinhardt, Director of German Theatre, Berlin. WILHELM RÖNTGEN, Professor of Physics, Munich. ADOLF VON SCHLATTER, Professor of Protestant Theology, Tübingen. REINHOLD SEEBERG, Professor of Protestant Theology, Berlin. MARTIN SPAHN, Professor of History, Strass- HANS THOMA, Professor of Chemistry, Berlin. The first thing that will strike anyone about this paper is in its ingenuousness. It betrays genuine surprise that any one should have doubted German honour, and genuine belief that this declaration by important men will cure the misunderstanding. The signers are unaccustomed to the calumnies of political life, to the slanders that fly in war time. They rise from their chairs to exorcise the enemies of their country's good name. The words which they sign have, to be sure, been put into their mouths; for what educated person could origi nate a paragraph like the one which deals with Belgian neutrality? "It is not true that we trespassed in neutral Belgium. . . . It would have been suicide on our part not to have been beforehand." The total lack of interest in all proof as to any of the assertions of the document is strange in scientific men. The extraordinary crudity, amounting almost to incoherency,—as if the voice of the speakers were choked with passion,-is strange as coming from men who say they speak for Art. The language of the address gives one a notion that Kultur is, after all, not quite the same thing as Cultivation. For a sort of boorish self-assertion pervades the document. The intellectual tone of it is quite low; and the embellishments due to literary art are clumsy. "Our troops with aching hearts were obliged to fire" is certainly exaggerated. Then, the philosophic theory which is propounded towards the close of the appeal, namely, that "Militarism in Germany arose in order to protect civilization from bands of robbers,"-gives a very hasty review of German history-very hasty and very emotional. Indeed the emotionalism of this document strikes us as keenly as its ingenuousness. It is signed by men who are out of their wits with excitement. They are banging the doors and throwing the books about. greatest minds in Germany. And these are the Of course we know how the document must have arisen. One of the enthusiastic professors drew the paper, and the authorities sent it around Germany for signature. The Emperor's name was behind it. Let us imagine that the aged Professor Wilhelm Foerster of Berlin, a man of eighty odd, is sitting in his library, mourning over the war, when a high Imperial official with a brass helmet on his head, is ushered in, bringing this Appeal for the aged Professor to sign. He cannot amend it, he cannot qualify it, or make a qualified acceptance of it. Sign he must. Moreover he is anxious to sign. single Professor whose signature was requested gave it with fervour. The Intellectuals were obliged to sign, but they also wanted to sign. That is the significant part of the matter. I imagine that every These gentlemen and scholars of Germany all with one accord blew this blast upon their trumpets. We may ask ourselves: Could not one of them have held back and issued a statement of his own in which the marks of an elevated mind should more appear? But to suggest such a thing is to misunderstand Germany. All of these men I was going to say "think alike." But it is not thinking, it is suffering. They all agonize alike. It is gratifying to find that the literati of Germany resent the habit which foreigners have of referring to the Imperial soldiers as "Huns." The interest which these literati take in political matters is very intense and is also quite recent; or they would have remembered that it was the Emperor William himself who charged his soldiers to deserve the name of "Huns, "-advice which they followed soon thereafter in China and subsequently in Belgium. At the time of the Boxer Rebellion in 1900, when the first troops were being sent from Germany, 'the Emperor enjoined them to take no prisoners and give no quarter, and to make the name of Germany a terror in China that would be remembered like that of Attila and his Huns for ،، a thousand years. Such vindictive utterances jarred on the ears of the public, and when soldiers wrote home about unmilitary barbarities appropriate to Huns, saying they were obeying the Emperor's orders, satirical strictures in the newspapers directed against the Emperor were plainer and sharper than they ever were before." The foregoing quotation is from Appleton's Annual Cyclopædia, 1900, p. 258. |