Charles Sarolea

“ The city of Dante, Machiavelli, Michael Angelo, has done more for culture than all the might and majesty of the Hohenzollern. Humanity is indebted to one small State—Palestine—for its religion. To another small State—Greece—humanity owes the beginning of all art and the foundations of politics. To other small States—Holland and Scotland—modern Europe is indebted for its political freedom. And are not the German people themselves indebted for the glories of their literature to the contemptible cities of Jena and Weimar? ”

“ A few days ago it was again my privilege to discuss the European situation with another Continental statesman whose name will for ever be identified with the cause of peace. I am not at liberty to disclose the identity of the illustrious speaker. Suffice it to say that he is a statesman whose every word compels attention all over the world and imposes respect, a man of infinite wit, of penetrating intellect, and whose commanding personality has on more than one occasion directed the course of world politics, and has helped to save Europe from an impending catastrophe. ”

“ Tolstoy is a believer, an enthusiast and a passionate reformer, and he spent all his life between Moscow and his paternal estate. Dostoevsky's life is a pathetic tale of hardship and suffering. An epileptic on the verge of insanity, he spent part of his life in prison and in exile. Yet those three great writers, so different in their personal characteristics, are bound by a unity of ideals. They are all characterized by the same Russian depth, the same love of reality and veracity. They have all the same hatred of cant and convention; they have all the same unconquerable love of freedom ”

“ The real and esoteric Montaigne is, like Nietzsche, a herald of revolt, one of the most revolutionary thinkers of all times. And the Gascon philosopher who philosophizes with a smile is far more dangerous than the Teuton who philosophizes with a hammer. The corrosive acid of his irony is more destructive than the violence of the other. Like Nietzsche, Montaigne transvalues all our moral values. Nothing is absolute; everything is relative. There is no law in morals. ”

“ They would like to persuade the world that the Russian people are engaged in the same struggle for freedom and equality, and that their triumph would inaugurate a new era for Russia and for mankind. They insist that the one event is as inevitable as the other, that resistance is equally futile, that any form of opposition will only make the ultimate triumph more decisive and more bloody, and that Russia is doomed to travel the same road as the France of 1789—from Despotism through Terror, towards Liberty. ”

“ For four hundred years their temporal and spiritual rulers have manufactured a nation of slaves. The war has manufactured a nation of revolutionists. What seemed an inexhaustible inheritance of loyalty and devotion has been wantonly squandered. The Hohenzollern Monarchy has been born in spoliation, baptized in blood, and welded together by iron. Blood and iron are now destroying it. The German armies have been the terror of the world. The day is drawing near when those same German armies will become a terror to their tyrants, and will call them to account for the slaughter of twenty nations. ”

“ The Jews are not a race, they are a nation. Wherever they have gone, they have remained a nation. We are too apt to forget that a nation is not a geographical expression. The Poles are a nation, and are not contained within geographical limits. Nor does a nation imply a common origin or blood relationship. The United States and the Russian Empire are made up of a score of different races. Nor does a nation even imply community of language, for the German-speaking Alsatians were, and still are, passionately French in sentiment, even as the French-Canadians have become loyal British citizens. ”

“ But the history of four hundred years convincingly shows that England in defending her own interests has always been fighting the battles of European liberty. And to-day more than ever, when Europe is transformed into an armed camp, when might has become the criterion of right, when all nations are living in perpetual dread of a European conflagration, the strict adherence of England to her old principle of the balance of power remains the best sanction of international law and the surest guarantee of the peace of the world. ”

“ To an Englishman war is a dwindling force, an anachronism. It may still sometimes be a necessity, a dura lex, an ultima ratio, but it is always a monstrous calamity. In other words, to an Englishman war is evil, war is immoral. On the contrary, to the German war is essentially moral. Indeed, it is the source of the highest morality, of the most valuable virtues, and without war the human race would speedily degenerate. ”

“ We have already cautioned the student of Russian history against the axiom that every nation has the Government it deserves, and deserves the Government it has. That axiom is only true, and even then only partially true, when the people, as is the case in Prussia, have no profound sense of political liberty and of personal dignity, where they abjectly and willingly submit to that Government. It is only true where the subjects accept the full responsibility for the policy of their rulers, where they glorify, as the Prussians do glorify, every evil deed of the civil and military authorities. ”

“ For generations Russia had been advancing slowly but surely towards the ultimate goal of what she considers her "historic mission." Like a weary traveller, exhausted by a long march, and who, arriving near the end, wanting to make one supreme effort to hasten on the desirable consummation—falls down prostrate, in view of the promised land—even so the Russians, on the eve of achieving their dreams, after patiently waiting for centuries, were suddenly seized with a feverish impatience and tried to precipitate events. ”

“ No one would call the political history of Germany an interesting history. It is only the history of free nations or the free play of spiritual forces that is of abiding human interest, and the history of Germany is neither the history of a free people nor the conflict of spiritual forces. That history is so intolerably tedious that even the magic of Treitschke’s genius has not been able to relieve its dulness, and that before the war no British or French publisher dared venture on a translation of Treitschke’s masterpiece. ”

“ In the first place there can be no religious schism, and therefore no religious war, which in France involved a life-and-death struggle, a war waged with all the fanaticism and horror of a crusade. In Russia the Church is a State department, not as in France, a state within the State: imperium in imperio. No religious passions will be stirred, for the hatred against the Jew is economic and racial, not religious.
In the second place, there can be no class war, for the simple reason that in Russia the aristocracy as a class has ceased to exist. ”

“ Nobody either in Europe or Germany wants war. Neither the Emperor nor his Ministers want war. War is too great a risk. It is too much of a gamble. In warfare it is always the unexpected that happens. War may be the national industry of Prussia. But it is the most speculative of all industries.
At the same time, whilst we are all wishing for peace, we must ever be on our guard. With the militarist tendencies of a bureaucratic and despotic State, with the economic pressure of an increasing population, one is always at the mercy of an incident. ”

“ The revolutionary forces are, no doubt, strong, but the Conservative forces are also formidable. It is not true that the less resistance is offered to the energies of destruction, the less bloody the revolution will be. It is not true that it is too late to prevent a catastrophe. No doubt it is so much easier to surrender one's will to the so-called "logic of events," to let the storm rage and pass, to "emigrate" like the French aristocracy, and to fly before danger, and if the catastrophe does break out, to make one man or one class the scapegoat of the national sins. ”

“ There is a most baneful delusion which has misled the Allies from the beginning of the war, and which is still being acted on after three years of a desperate struggle—namely, that we are mainly fighting a sinister political dynasty and a formidable political machine constructed with all the diabolical ingenuity and armed with all the resources of the destructive genius of man. If, indeed, we had only been confronted by the Kaiser and his paladins, or only threatened by his military machine, the war would long ago have been ended—if not by the Allies, then by the German people themselves. ”

“ The political condition of Russia to-day is very like the political condition of France in 1789. To the Russian Revolutionists, the French Revolution is not a dead and distant past, it is a living present; it continues, and it will continue for a generation to come, to exert a subtle and profound influence which it is impossible to overrate. Even as the leaders of the French Revolution were haunted by the memories of ancient Rome, and by the heroes of Plutarch, the Russian Revolutionists are obsessed and possessed by the tragic events of 1789, and the heroes of the Terror. ”

“ It is the mainspring of national progress. There are three causes which have ensured the present greatness of the German Empire: moral virtue in the individual, political unity, and economic prosperity. If we were to believe modern theorists, Germany owes all three to the beneficent action of war. Germany is not indebted for its culture to the genius of its writers or artists, but to the iron and blood of its statesmen and warriors. It is the glorious triumvirate of Bismarck, Moltke, and von Roon who have been the master-builders of the Vaterland. ”

“ Is not the very existence of this wonderful language an obstacle in the path of civilization? Will it not for ever prevent Western culture from gaining access to the Empire of the Tsars? Will it not for ever keep Russia isolated from Europe? It is strange that while Nature has established no physical barrier between Eastern and Western Europe, and has made one unbroken plain extending for thousands of miles, men should have erected this formidable intellectual barrier of language between the Latin, the Teuton, and the Slav. ”

“ If it be indeed true that a few machine-guns may decide the issue, it will be by no means difficult for the insurgent people to secure possession of those machine-guns. If it be true that a military training is essential to success, millions of Germans have received that training. Let only the merest fraction of the people raise the standard of rebellion, and let the spirit of rebellion be rife, and that spirit will spread like wild-fire, and the Hohenzollern Monarchy after this war will be brought to the ground like a decaying tree in a November gale. ”

“ But Turgenev is still more; he is a master of European literature. He has neither the inspiration of Gogol, nor the epic grandeur or the prophetic breath of Tolstoy, nor the profound tragedy of Dostoevsky, nor the democratic sentiment of Gorky and Chekhov. His horizon is as limited and monotonous as the horizon of the steppes. He works with certain ever-recurring types of lovers, proprietors, peasants, intellectuals, and revolutionaries. If his talent remains personal and original, if he has not (whatever may be said against him) copied from his predecessors, he is for ever copying himself. ”

“ The German people were tired of their political impotence, of their miserable dynastic quarrels, of their abject subservience to their parasitic princelings. The German people, broken up in a hundred petty States, had the legitimate and praiseworthy ambition of becoming a united people. German unity had been for generations a cherished dream of German patriots. History had abundantly proved that the Austrian Empire could not assist in the realization of that dream. Then came the opportunity of the Prussian tempter. ”

“ If there is one other lesson which the French Revolution teaches with irresistible persuasiveness, it is this: that a country confronted with the tremendous tasks of economic, political, social, and religious reorganization, exhausted by a colossal foreign war, and threatened by a no less ominous civil war, can only be saved by a strong government and a liberal despotism. No doubt, the tasks before Russia are very different from those which France had to solve, but they are even more Titanic. ”

“ How shall we explain this startling paradox? How is it, and why is it, that the artistic and exuberant, genial and sentimental German submits to the hard rule of the commonplace, uninteresting, and dour Prussian?
If you ask ninety-nine out of a hundred Germans they will not give you a reply. They know too little of and care too little about politics to be even aware of the fact. They are satisfied with appearances. They do not see the King of Prussia behind the German Kaiser. They are hypnotized by the glittering helmet of the War Lord. ”

“ It is a tragic paradox that the very people who have been the one bulwark against Asiatic hordes and a protection against the Tartar invasion should still be denounced as a people of Asiatics and Tartars. It is a paradox that we should revile as barbarians the very nation whose sublime mission in history has been to win over the barbarians of Asia to Christianity and to European civilization. ”

“ Christianity denies life; Nietzsche asserts it. Christianity mainly thinks of the future world; Nietzsche has his feet firmly planted on Mother Earth. Christianity glorifies meekness and humility; Nietzsche glorifies pride and self-assertion. Christianity defends the poor and the weak; Nietzsche contends that the strong alone have a right to live. Christianity blesses the peacemakers; Nietzsche extols the warriors. Christianity is the religion of human suffering; Nietzsche is a worshipper of life, and proclaims the joyful science, die fröhliche Wissenschaft, the gaya scienza. ”

“ No doubt the peasantry may be got to rise in some bloody "jacquerie." They might be drawn into some agrarian revolution—like the Pougatchef revolt in the eighteenth century—which would satisfy their craving for possessing and extending the soil they cultivate. But the hunger for land once satisfied, the peasantry would again become conservative, like the French peasant proprietor after the French Revolution, and so far from joining any mere "intellectual" revolution, they would dread such a revolution as a possible reaction and as a menace to their newly acquired rights. ”

“ In the first place we are told that Prussian reaction is too strong, and that for the German people to attack the Hohenzollern stronghold would be as hopeless as for a madman or a prisoner to break down the walls of his prison or cell. The prisoner would only break his head, and the madman would only get himself put into a “strait-waistcoat.” The German rebel is confronted by the impregnable structure of a solid and efficient Government, a Government based on the prestige of the past, and surrounded by the glamour of triumphant victories achieved in great national wars. ”

“ Of the many strange paradoxes in the romantic history of Israel not the least strange is this, that the Jewish nation should have found a home and refuge in that desolate and remote corner of Eastern Europe once ruled by the Jesuits, and that the destiny of the Jews should have become so closely associated with the fate of a Catholic people, which, like the Jews, has only an ideal existence; which, like the Jews, has been oppressed and suppressed, and which, like the Jews, has asserted its vitality in the face of economic degradation and political martyrdom. ”

“ War is the essential activity of the State. But in order to be strong in war, unity and concentration are essential; they are the conditions of victory. That unity may, no doubt, be achieved under any form of government. It may be achieved under a republic, as it was during the wars of the French Revolution. It may be achieved under an aristocracy, as in the case of Great Britain, which is a monarchy only in name, which, in reality, is a Parliamentary oligarchy, and which is always waging some guerilla in some outlying post of empire. ”

“ To the unprejudiced student there can be no doubt that the one man primarily responsible is Frederick the Great, the master-builder of Prussian militarism and Prussian statecraft. He it is who has been poisoning the wells; he it is who first conceived of the State as a barracks; he it is who has “Potsdamized” the Continent and transformed Europe into a military camp. Strangely enough, all civilized nations to-day have proclaimed Prussia accursed. Yet we continue to hero-worship the man who made Prussia what she is. ”

“ The one supreme and original contribution of the Russian mind to world literature is its power of psychological analysis, its broad humanity, its manysidedness, its understanding of every type of human character. Those qualities strike us equally in Gogol's "Dead Souls," in Dostoevsky's "Crime and Punishment," in Turgenev's "Sportsmen Sketches." And those qualities reach their maturity and perfection in Tolstoy's art.
His power of sympathy is unlimited. He understands the sinner, because he has been a sinner. He understands the saint, because he has aspired to be a saint. ”

“ Not only has Prussian history been the centre of all Treitschke’s activities; it also supplies him with the sole standard of all political values, the sole test of the truth of all political theories. With superb logic he deduces all his political system from the vicissitudes of the Brandenburg State. His sympathies and antipathies, his affinities and repulsions, are Prussian. Prussia and the German Empire have monopolized all human virtues. ”

“ Suppress the Hohenzollern dynasty, the Prussian bureaucracy, and the Junker Army, and the Prussian structure crumbles to pieces.
Nature has been niggardly to Prussia. Everything has had to be made with the hands of man. Brandenburg, Pomerania, Western and Eastern Prussia are dreary wastes; Berlin is an oasis of brick and stone amidst a Sahara of sand. The provinces of old Prussia have few industrial resources. The very soil had to be made by intensive agricultural methods. The very population had to be imported. Modern Prussia is neither the gift of Nature nor the outcome of history. ”

“ We are constantly being told that “knowledge is power,” and that the knowledge of a foreign language means not only intellectual power, but commercial and political power. Yet those in authority do not budge an inch to get possession of such power. We are constantly warned by political pessimists that Germany is making gigantic strides, and that we ought to keep a vigilant outlook. Yet we do nothing to obtain first-hand information of the resources of a nation of sixty-five millions, who is certainly a formidable commercial rival, and who to-morrow may meet us in deadly encounter. ”

“ THE CURSE OF THE HOHENZOLLERN I.—Royalties made in Germany. It has become a trite and hackneyed claim of the Prussian megalomaniacs that they are an Imperial people, a super-race predestined by Nature and Providence to the domination of the world. It certainly seems a grotesque claim to assert on the part of a people who in their political and social life have shown themselves a pre-eminently servile people; who have ever been cringing to their superiors; who never produced one single leader of free men, one Cromwell, one Mirabeau, one Gambetta ”

“ It is true that Members of Parliament and journalists are ready enough to proceed to Germany on a mission of goodwill, and to be entertained at banquets and international festivities. But how futile must be those friendly demonstrations when we consider that the enormous majority of those Parliamentarians and journalists are unable to read a German newspaper! And how must it strike a citizen of Hamburg or Frankfurt when their English guests have to reply in English to the toasts of their German hosts! ”