Ten Years Near the German Frontier: A Retrospect and a Warning

It is an open secret that Norway, at the time of her separation from Sweden, would have preferred a republican form of government. The Powers, England and Russia and Germany, would not hear of this, and the Norwegians consented to a very limited monarchy. German or Russian princes were out of the question, and Prince Charles of Denmark, now King Haakon, who had married the Princess Maud of Great Britain and Ireland, was chosen. King Edward VII. was pleased with this arrangement; he had no special objection to the cutting down of monarchical prerogatives, provided the hereditary principle was maintained, and the marriage strengthened the English influence in Norway. As King Haakon and Queen Maud have a son – Prince Olav – the Norwegians are content, especially as King Haakon knows well how to hold his place with tact, sympathy, and discretion.

Norway is naturally friendly to the United States and England, and, in spite of the Kaiser's regular summer visits, it was never at all friendly to him. The treatment of Norway, when the Germans found that the Norwegians were openly against their methods, was ruthless. The plot of the German military party against the capital of Norway, which meant the blowing up of a part of the city, has been hinted at, but not yet fully revealed. The reports of the attempt to introduce bombs in the shape of coals into the holds of Norwegian ships bound to America were well founded, and the misery and wretchedness inflicted on the families of Norwegian sailors by the U-boat 'horribleness' has made the German name detested in Norway. After the crime of the Lusitania, the German Minister was publicly hissed in Christiania.

Remaining neutral, Norwegian business men kept up such trade with the belligerents as the U-boat on one side and the embargo on the other permitted. War and business seem to have no scruples, and the Norwegian merchant, like most of ours, before we joined the Allies, felt it his duty to try to send what he could into Germany. The British Minister at Christiania, the British Admiralty, and a patriotic group of Norwegians did their utmost in limiting this, and, when the United States entered the war, they were ably seconded by the American Minister, Mr. Schmedeman. The Norwegians, in spite of all dangers, kept their boats running, and they were shocked when the United States tightened the embargo, with a strangle grip.

The Norwegian press openly said that we, the friend of the little nations, had proved faithless, and pointed to their record as friends of democracy. The American Minister, in the midst of the storm, did an unusual thing; he published the text of the prepared agreement, which Nansen had sent to Washington to negotiate. There was a time, before this, when the name of our country, formerly so beloved and revered, was execrated among the Norwegians. Mr. Schmedeman's quick insight calmed a storm which arose from disappointment at the stringent demands of a nation they had hitherto considered as their best friend. This constant friendship for us was shown on all occasions in Copenhagen by Dr. Francis Hagerup and Dr. John Irgens, two of the most respected diplomatists in Europe. Dr. Hagerup's reputation is widely spread in this country.

No human being could be imagined as a greater antithesis to the Prussians than the Norwegians; the Norwegian is in love with liberty; he is an idealistic individual; it is difficult, too, to believe that the Norwegian, the Swede and the Dane are of the same race. The Norwegian is as obstinate as a Lowland Scot and as practical; he is a born politician; he calls a spade a spade, and he is not noted for that great exterior polish which distinguishes the Swede and the Dane of the educated classes. A Norwegian gentleman will have good manners, but he is never 'mannered.' For frankness, which sometimes passes for honesty, the Norwegian of the lower classes is unequalled. This has given the Norwegian a reputation for rudeness which he really does not deserve. He is no more rude than a child who looks you in the eye and gives his opinion of your personal appearance without fear or favour; it does not imply that he is unkind. There is a story of a Norwegian shipowner, who, asked to dine with King Haakon, found that a business engagement was more attractive, so he telephoned: 'Hello, Mr. King, I can't come to dinner!'

A Norwegian told me, with withering scorn, the 'stupid comment' of an 'ignorant Swede' on the Norwegian character: 'You have no Niagara Falls in Sweden, no great city like Chicago, no Red Indians!' He had said, 'We have finer cataracts than your Niagara Falls, a magnificent city, Stockholm, the Paris of Scandinavia, and many Red Indians, but we call them Norwegians!'

One summer day, two well-mounted German officers, probably attending the Kaiser or making arrangements for his usual yachting trip to Norway, came along a country road. They were splendid looking creatures, voluminously cloaked – a wind was blowing – helmets glittering. Our car had stopped on a side road; something was wrong. A peasant, manipulating two great pine stems on a low, two-wheeled cart, had barred the main road, and, as the noontide had come, sat down to eat his breakfast. One of the officers haughtily commanded him to clear the way, expecting evidently a frightened obedience. The peasant put his hands in his pockets and said, – 'Mr. Man, I will move my logs when I can. First, I must eat my breakfast, you can jump your horses over my logs; why not? Jump!'

The officer made a movement to draw his revolver; the Norwegian only laughed.

'Besides,' he said, 'there is a wheel half off my cart; I cannot move it quickly.'

The language of the officers was terrifying. Finally, they were compelled to jump. Neither the sun glittering on the fierce eagles nor the curses of the officers moved this amiable man; he drank peacefully from his bottle of schnapps and munched his black bread and sausage as if their great persons had never crossed his path, or, rather, he theirs.

Neither art, literature nor music has been Germanised in Norway. Art, of later years, has been touched by the French ultra-impressionists. There is no humble home in the mountains that does not know Grieg. And why? When you know Grieg and know Norway, you know that Grieg is Norway.

Norway is the land of the free and the home of the brave. There was no fear that German ideas would control it, and the Prussians knew this. What is good in German methods of education the Norwegians adopt, but they first make them Norwegian.

CHAPTER VII

THE RELIGIOUS PROPAGANDA

Machiavelli, in The Prince, instructs rulers in the use of religion as a means of obtaining absolute power; and from the point of view of monarchs of the Renaissance and after, he would have been a fool, if he had neglected this important bond in uniting the nations he governed. It was not a question as to the internal faith of the ruler; that was a personal matter; but outwardly he must conform to the creed which gave him the greatest political advantages. There is a pretty picture of Napoleon's teaching the rudiments of Christianity to a little child at Saint Helena; but who imagines that he would have hesitated to make the sacred pilgrimage to Mecca or to prostrate himself before the idols of any powerful Pagan nation, if he could have fulfilled his plans in the East? 'Paris vaut une Messe,' said Henry IV. of Navarre and France with the cynicism of his tribe. Queen Catherine di Medici and Queen Elizabeth had their superstitions. They probably believed that all clever people have the same religion, but never tell what it is – the religion to which Lord Beaconsfield thought he belonged. It is against the subversion of religion, of spirituality, to the State that democracy protests. Frankly, it is as much against the despotism of Socialism as it is against the Machiavellianism of His late Imperial Majesty, the German Emperor. He hoped to become Emperor of Germany and the world, and to speak from Berlin urbi et ubi. To be German Emperor did not content him.

The Kaiser's use of religion as an adjunct to the possession of absolute power began very early in his reign. Bismarck could teach him nothing, though Bismarck was as decided a Hegelian as he was a Prussian in his idea of the function of the ruler.

Hegel, the learned author of the Philosophy of Right, was Prussian to the core. He was on the side of the rulers, and he hated reforms, or rather, feared reformers, because they might disturb the divinely ordered authority. There must be a dot to the 'i' or it meant nothing in the alphabet. This dot was the King. He was the darling of the Prussian Government and the spokesman of Frederick William III. He loathed the movement in Germany towards democratic reforms, and watched England with distrustful eyes. The teaching of most Hegelians in the Universities of the United States – and the Hegelian idea of the State had made much progress here – was to minimise somewhat the arbitrary and despotic ideas of their favourite Prussian philosopher. No man living has yet understood the full meaning of all parts of his philosophical teachings, but one thing was clear to all men who, like myself, watched the application of Hegelianism to Prussia and to Germany. The State must be supreme.

The Catholics in Germany saw the errors of Hegelianism as applied to the State, but they were not sufficiently enlightened or clever, and they neglected to oppose its progress efficiently. There are various opinions about the activities of the Fathers of the Congregation of Jesus (founded by Saint Ignatius Loyola as a corps d'élite of the counter-reformation) in Germany and in the world in general. Bismarck heartily disapproved of them for the same reasons as Hegel disapproved of them. They taught that Cæsar is not omnipotent, that the human creature has rights which must be respected, and are above the claims of the State. In a word, in Germany, they stood for the one thing that the Prussian monarchs detested – dissent on the part of any subject to their growing assertion of the divine right of kings.

Windthorst formed the Centrum, and opposed Bismarck valiantly, but political considerations Prussianised the Centre, or Catholic party, as they moved 'the enemies of Prussianism,' the Socialists, when the crucial moment arrived, and burned incense to absolute Cæsar. It was not a question of Lutheranism against Catholicism in Germany in 1872, not a question of an enlightened philosophy, founded on modern research against obscurantism, as most of my compatriots have until lately thought, but a clean-cut issue between the doctrine of the entire supremacy of the State and the inherent rights of the citizen to the pursuit of happiness, provided he rendered what he owed to Cæsar legitimately. That the victims of the oppression were Jesuits blinded many of us to the motive of the attack. The educational system of the Jesuits had enemies among the Catholics of Germany, too, so that they lost sight of the principle underneath the Falk laws, so dear to Bismarck. Frederick the Great and Catherine of Russia protected the Jesuits, it is true, but they were too absolute to fear them. Besides, as Intellectuals, they were bound to approve of a society, which in the eighteenth century had not lost its reputation for being the most scientific of religious bodies.

The Falk laws were, in the opinion of Bismarck and the disciples of the Kulturkampf, the beginning of the moulding of the Catholic Church in Germany as a subordinate part of the autocratic scheme of government. They had nothing to fear from the Lutherans – they were already under control – and nothing to fear from the unbelieving Intellectuals, of the Universities, for they had already accepted Hegel and his corollaries. The main enemies of the ultra-Kaiserism were the Catholic Church and Socialism – Socialism gradually drawing within its circle those men who, under the name of Social Democrats, believed that the Hohenzollern rule meant obscurantist autocracy.

The Socialists, pure and simple, are as great an enemy to democracy as the Pan-Germans. The varying shades of opinion among the Social Democrats, – there are liberals among them of the school of Asquith, and even of the school of Lloyd George, constitutional monarchists with Jeffersonian leanings, Lutherans, Catholics, non-believers, men of various shades of religious opinion are all bent on one thing, – the destruction of the ideals of Government advocated by Hegel and put into practice by the Emperor and his coterie.

Both the Socialist and the Social Democrat came to Copenhagen. They talked; they argued. They were on neutral soil. It was impossible to believe, on their own evidence, that the Socialism of Marx, of Bebel, of the real Socialists in Germany, could remedy any of the evils which existed under imperialistic régime in that country.

The Socialist or the Social Democrat was feared in Germany, until he applied the razor to his throat, or, rather, attempted hari-kari when he voted for war. The Socialists can never explain this away. His prestige, as the apostle of peace and good-will, is gone; he is no longer international; he is out of count as an altruist. The Social Democrat is in a better position; he never claimed all the attributes of universal benignity; he was still feared in Germany, but in that harmless debating society, the Reichstag, with the flower of the German manhood made dumb in the trenches, he could only threaten in vain.

In our country, pure Socialism is misunderstood. It is either cursed with ignorant fury or looked on as merely democracy, a little advanced, and perhaps too individualistic. It ought to be better understood. Socialism means the negation of the individual will; the deprivations of the individual of all the rights our countrymen are fighting for. It is a false Christianity with Christian precepts of good-will, of love of the poor, of equality, fraternity, liberty, – phrases which have, on the lips of the pure Socialist, the value of the same phrases uttered by Robespierre and Marat.

'I find,' said a Berlin Socialist, whom I had invited to meet Ben Tillett, the English Labour Agitator, 'that Danish Socialism is merely Social Democracy. Given a fair amount of good food and comfort, schools, and cheap admittance to the theatres, the Copenhagen Socialists seem to be contented. You may call it "constructive Socialism," but I call it Social Degeneracy. We, following the sacred principles of Marx and Bakounine, different as they were, must destroy before we can construct. In the future, every honest man will drive in his own car, and the best hospitals will not be for those that pay, but for those who cannot pay. Cagliostro said we must crush the lily, meaning the Bourbons; we must crush all that stands in the way of the perfect rule which will make all men equal. We must destroy all governments as they are conducted at present; we have suffered; all restrictive laws must go!'

Ben Tillett could not come to luncheon that day, so we missed a tilt and much instruction. The European Socialist's only excuse for existence is that he has suffered, and he has suffered so much that his sufferings must cry to God for justice. As to his methods, they are not detestable. They are so reasonable, so Christian, that some of us lose sight of his principles in admiring them. The Kaiser has borrowed some of the best of the Socialistic methods in the organisation of his superbly organised Empire, and that makes Germany strong. But sympathy with the Socialists anywhere is misplaced. Their principles are as destructive as their methods are admirable. Their essential article of faith is that the State, named the Socialistic aggregation, shall be supreme and absolute.

As to the other enemies of despotism in Germany, the Jesuits, they were downed simply because Bismarck and the Hegelian Ideal would not tolerate them. They exalted, as Hegel said, the virtue of resignation, of continency, of obedience, above the great old Pagan virtues, which ought to distinguish a Teuton. The Jesuits, German citizens, few in number, apparently having no powerful friends in Europe or the world, were cast out, as the War Lord would have cast out the Socialist if he had dared. But the Socialists were a growing power; they had shown that they, like the unjust steward in the parable, know how to make friends of the Mammon of unrighteousness.

The Jesuits went; the Catholic party, the Centre was placated by the request of Germany to have the Pope arbitrate the affair of the Caroline Islands and by the colonial policy of Bismarck in 1888 in supporting the work of Cardinal Lavigerie in Africa. The Catholic population of Germany, more than one-third of the whole, accepted the dictum that the State had the right to exile German citizens because they disagreed with the Government as to the freedom of the human conscience. However, as the Catholic Germans were divided in sentiment as to the value of the Jesuit system of education, which in this country seems to be very plastic, they were at last fooled by the Centrum, their party, into the acceptance of a compromise.

To Copenhagen, there came, after the opening of the war, an old priest, who had been caught in the net in Belgium; 'That Christians should forgive such horrors as the Germans commit! Why do not the Christian Germans protest? I confessed a German Colonel, a Catholic, who had lain a day and a night in a field outside a Belgian town. He was dying when some of your Americans found him, and brought him to me. "I suffered horrors during the night," he said, "horrors almost unbearable. I groaned many times; I heard the voices of men passing; these men heard me." "There is a wounded man," one said, and they came to me. "He's a German," the other said, "qu'il crève" (let him die). And they passed on. "This," I thought, in my agony, "this, in a Christian land where the story of the Good Samaritan is read from the pulpits; yet they leave me to die. But when I remembered, Father, the atrocities for which I had been obliged to shoot ten of my own soldiers, I understood why they had passed me by."' The good priest, who had many friends in Germany, repeated over and over again: 'Whom the gods wish to destroy, they first make mad; the Catholics in Germany must be mad!'

Bismarck had used Falk and the Liberals to divide and control. He later found it necessary to placate Windthorst and the Centrum, then a 'confessional,' or religious party. It has changed since that time; it is now, like the Social Democratic block, made up of persons of various shades of religious opinion, but having similar political ideas. It represents a determination not to allow the State to be absolute, and, no doubt, if the United States had realised its position, it might have been strengthened by intelligent propaganda to be of use in breaking the Prussian autocracy. But hitherto even travelled Americans have regarded it as a remnant of the Middle Ages, and hopelessly reactionary. It was part of the Kaiser's policy to make the rest of the world think so, for he had adopted and adapted this Bismarckian chart while throwing the pilot of many stormy seas overboard. Bismarck lived to see the heritage of despotism, which he had destined for his oldest son, seized by a young monarch, whose capabilities he had underrated. Then, the Danes say, he uttered the sneer, 'I will freshen the Hohenzollern blood with that of Struense!'

The German propaganda for controlling the Church in the United States had been well thought out in 1866. The emigrants from Germany, just after 1848, were not open to the influence of Prussian ideas; they had had more than sufficient of them, but when the great crowd of Germans came in later, it was time to inject the proper spirit of Prussianism into their veins.

It is well known that the Emperor William had his eyes on the Vatican. He was wise enough to see that if the Catholic Church lost in one place, she was certain to gain in another; it was not necessary for him to read Macaulay's eloquent passage on the Papacy, as most statesmen who speak English do. But his indiscretions in speech and writing, whether premeditated or not, for the Zeitgeist and the orthodox Lutherans must be propitiated – were constantly nullifying his plans.

As to the spiritual essence of the Catholic Church, the emperor did not recognise it. Papal Rome was dangerous to him as long as it remained independent; he coquetted with Harnack and with the most advanced of the higher critics who whittled the Bible into a pipestem. How he squared himself with the orthodox Lutherans, apparently nearly two-thirds of the population, can only be shown by his constant allusions to the Prussian God. As a State Church, yielding obedience almost entirely to the governing power of the country, he had little fear of Lutheranism in its varying shades of opinion. The Jews he evidently always distrusted. He regarded them as Internationalists and not to be recognised until they became of the State Church; then they might aspire, for certain considerations, to be rath and even to wear the precious von.

The emperor wanted control of the Vatican. He knows history (at least we thought so in Copenhagen), and he was sympathetic with his ancestors in all their quarrels with the Holy See on the subject of the investitures; the emperor had wisely foreseen that difficulties of the same kind between the Vatican and himself might easily break out, were not the Vatican modernised or controlled. He knew that the claims of the Popes to dethrone rulers could never be revived since they were not inherent in the Papacy, but only admitted by the consent of Christendom, which had ceased to exist as a political entity; but the question of the right of a lay emperor to control the policy of the Holy Father in matters of the religious education, marriage, church discipline of Catholics might at any time arise. He knew the non possumus of Rome too well to believe that in a spiritual crisis she could be moved by the threats of any ruler. If His Imperial Majesty could have forced the principle of some of his ancestors that the religion of a sovereign must be that of his subjects, the question might be settled. If he could have arranged the religion of his subjects as easily as he settled the question as to the authenticity of the Flora of Lucas in Berlin in favour of Director Bode, how clear the way would have been! As it was, he knew too well what he might expect from Rome in a crisis where he, following the Prussian Zeitgeist, might wish to infringe on the spiritual prerogatives. To understand the world every European diplomatist of experience knows the Vatican must not be ignored, and, while the War Lord, the future emperor of the world, hated to acknowledge this, he was compelled to do it. The Vatican, that had nullified the May laws and defeated Falk, their sponsor, might give the emperor trouble at any time. Catholics of the higher classes all over Europe were ceasing to be Royalists. The Pope, Leo XIII., had even accepted the French Republic, and for the part of Cardinal Rampolla and of Archbishop Ireland in this the Kaiser hid his rancour. He must be absolute as far as the right of his family and those of the hereditary succession went, and quite as absolute in his control over such laws as were for the increase of the Kultur of his people.

At one time, since the present war opened, it was rumoured at Copenhagen that plural marriages were to be allowed, to increase the population of a nation so rapidly being depleted. I was astonished to hear a German Lutheran pastor – he was speaking personally, and not for his church – say that there was nothing against this in the teachings of Luther or Melanchthon. He quoted the affair of a Landgraf of Hesse in the sixteenth century.

'But the Kaiser would not consent to this,' I said. 'Why not?' responded the pastor. 'He knows his Old Testament; he has the right of private interpretation especially when the good of the State is to be considered.'

'Over a third of the Germans are Catholics; the Pope would never consent to that.'

'There would be an obstacle,' he admitted; 'but the Kaiser, in the interests of the nation, would have his way. Our nation must have soldiers. You Americans,' he added, bitterly, 'are killing our prospective fathers in the name of Bethlehem. We must make up the deficit by turning to the Hebraic practice.'

'You cannot bring the Catholics to that, and I doubt whether any decent people would consent to it, in spite of your quotation from Luther's precedent. No Pope could allow it.'