JOHN WILLIAM BURGESS
THE EUROPEAN WAR OF 1914
Its
Causes, Purposes, and Probable Results
1915
CHAPTER III
p. 82—112
82
CHAPTER III
THE UNDERLYING CAUSES OF THE WAR
SOME days ago I read an editorial in one of our
leading journals in which the writer said that those persons who were
endeavoring to explain the German point of view of the great European
movement now realizing itself were simply beating out their brains
against the stone wall of American public opinion. It was something for
this writer to acknowledge that they had any brains to beat out, and I
have no doubt that they are all deeply grateful for the favor, for they
have certainly learned to appreciate small favors. I do not know
whether the noble writer classes me among those whose brains are now
bespattering this adamantine wall, I presume he does. But there is just
enough of them left in their original home to evolve this thought as
the keynote of this chapter, namely, that there is something still
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harder than
this stone wall of public opinion, and still harder, though in a
different sense, than the bombproof casemate cranium of the man who
wrote that editorial. That something is the Destiny which rules this
world. It is the power which puts one civilization after another at the
head of the column of human progress in the world-historic march
towards universal civilization. It shall be our effort in this chapter
to gain a point of observation from which we may determine whither this
column is advancing and which of the Nations is, for our age, its true
leader. I do not think it difficult for any deep reader of the world's
history to satisfy himself as to the first question. Through all the
changes of government and empire, through all of the successions of
peoples and nations to the leadership, and through all of the turnings
and windings and zigzags of the course, he sees mankind ever
progressing towards a more and more general distribution of the fruits
of civilization, namely, intelligence, education, character, and
wealth; and
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he sees the
leadership in the march passing from hand to hand in accordance with
the ability to bring about this wider and wider distribution from age
to age.
The second question, however, requires more
detailed, if not more exact, examination. Some years ago, in the
company of its steward, I was going over one of those magnificent ducal
estates in England, which render England the most beautiful spot on
earth to look upon. As I viewed its wonderful lawns and pastures and
forests, an exquisite expanse for hunt, play, and recreation, I asked
the steward whether the products of the estate supported the workers
and dwellers on it, not including the Duke and his immediate family. He
answered promptly, "No." I then asked him whence the additional sum
necessary for their support came. He answered as promptly that the Duke
furnished it. I queried again of him as to where the Duke procured it,
whether his other country estates were more profitable. He replied:
"No," that the Duke's income was from the
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rent of his
houses in London. I pushed the investigation still further and inquired
as to the source of the means of the Duke's city tenants enabling them
to pay the Duke rent. He explained that it was manufacture, trade, and
commerce; and when I requested to know with whom this commerce and
trade were carried on and to whom the manufactured products were sold,
he answered again unhesitatingly: "With and to the Colonies as the
fixed and regular course and with and to the rest of the world as
circumstances permit." Still further, I asked of him whether all the
landlords of England were in the same condition economically as the one
he served, and his response was in the affirmative.
From these brief but pointed replies I gathered that
the British economic system consisted of the following fundamental
ele-ments: First, an upper ten to twenty thousand — with their
immediate families we will call them fifty to one hundred thousand —
owning the land, the houses, and the capital of the British Islands,
the Landlords, the
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Railroad
Kings, the Manufacturing Lords, the Shipping Lords, the Great Bankers,
and the Large Importers; second, the division of the land in the
country into vast estates, the princely homes of these privileged
classes, and used in so great measure for the gratification of the
taste of the owners and for their sport, pleasure, and recreation, as
to reduce the products of agriculture to about one-fourth of what is
necessary for the feeding of the inhabitants of the Islands; third, the
gathering of the great mass of the population into cities, the centres
of manufacture, trade, and commerce, resulting in overcrowding and the
poverty, sickness, vice, and ignorance attendant thereon, that is, in
the development of the slum and the proletariat; fourth, a vast
Colonial dominion, ever increasing in extent, in which to dispose of
the manufactured products of the Islands and from which to draw in
exchange the agricultural products to feed them, and from which to draw
also mining wealth, official salaries, and liberal interest upon loaned
and invested
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capital;
fifth, a vast merchant marine, sufficient in its strength to control
the trade and commerce between the Islands and the Colonial Empire in
all parts of the world, and a vast navy, able to sustain and protect
this control at will by physical force.
I communicated these thoughts substantially as here
stated to my host and asked him whether it was a fair presentation of
the existing British economic system. He replied that it was, with the
modification that in practice Great Britain permitted free trade
between her Colonies and other countries. I said to him that Great
Britain can do that safely now (1887), because as a matter of fact she
has at this time no real competitor in manufacture and commerce — but
suppose some successful competitor should arise? He answered: "We
should have to shut them out by law or destroy them by force." But, I
inquired finally, would your Colonies acquiesce in a protective tariff
imposed by the British Parliament against the rest of the world for the
profit of the British manufac-
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turer? And he
replied: " Possibly not, and in that case we would have to destroy our
competitor by physical force."
I cannot perceive that this British economic system
has changed substantially between that date (1887) and the present.
Between then and now it has been obliged to release Ireland, in large
degree, from its clutch, and it has introduced some features of the
German pension and insurance system for the relief of its proletariat.
On the other hand nearly two millions of square miles more of the
earth's surface with the people inhabiting the same have been brought,
chiefly by fire and sword, within its control, and the development of
American multi-millionairedom with the aspiration of the members of it
for British titles has opened up, through international marriage, a new
and productive source of contribution and revenue for the British
nobility, tending to the preservation of the system.
At the beginning of this century, Mr. Chamberlain
and his followers made an ear-
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nest effort to
ward off the dangers to the system of allowing other countries to trade
freely with the British Colonies by proposing the adoption of the high
protective tariff principle, but were unable to make the Parliament and
the people realize the situation. They did not believe that any other
country could successfully compete with British manufacture, and they
shrank from the effect upon the Colonies of an attempt to force them
artificially to purchase British goods. And so, in spite of some
preferences in favor of the British products, the economic system of
the Empire was on August 1, 1914, substantially as described in general
outline above.
It is a general feature of political history that
the governmental system tends to adjust itself to the economic. It is
not difficult to see that such an economic system as the British,
having, as its keynotes, indefinite Colonial expansion and the control
of the commerce of the seas, would require, on the Governmental side,
an overwhelming navy, pro-
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fessional
colonial armies, and a more and more unlimited Government; a Government
which can act promptly and decisively and, if necessary, secretly. This
is precisely the course taken in the recent developments of the British
political system.
During the last ten years, by the invention and
construction of the dreadnaughts, the Navy has been made invincible and
has won for Great Britain the sovereignty over the seas. At this moment
no nation in the world and no combination of nations venture to dispute
this or even to assert its or their own heretofore claimed rights
thereon against it. At the same time the colonial armies have been
strengthened and disciplined and seasoned by action until they are not
only capable of suppressing insurrection and revolt, but of extending
the boundaries of the Colonial Empire in all parts of the world.
Lastly, the British Government has gradually become
a group of Ministers wielding the unlimited powers of the majority in an
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unlimited
House of Commons. There is no longer a British constitution according
to the American idea of constitutional government. With us
constitutional government is limited government, government limited
judicially by the rights of the individual, expressed and guaranteed by
a written instrument, ordained by the sovereign people and interpreted
and enforced by the courts, and limited politically by the
constitutional distribution of powers between, and the coordination of,
separate and independent departments of government. In this only true
sense of constitutional government, the British Government is a
despotism. There is no judicial body which can uphold the rights of the
individual against an act of Parliament; in fact, against an act of
Parliament no individual right exists. There is no independent
executive which can veto, modify, check, or delay an act of Parliament.
And the House of Lords can now no longer thwart or even modify
permanently the will of the House of Commons, wielded by the majority
party in that
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House, under
the leadership of its Executive Committee, the Cabinet of Ministers.
The Russian economic and political systems have more
points of likeness with the British than is usually conceived.
Substituting the Czar for the almighty House of Commons, and the Grand
Ducal circle for the Cabinet, and keeping in mind that the connection
of the dependencies with the nucleus of the Empire is territorial
instead of oversea, and that, therefore, the necessary organ of
military power is a vast army instead of an overwhelming navy, and you
have in substance the elements whose play and interplay bring about
something like the same results and produce something like the same
policy as in the British system. At least we may say that the two are
admirably adapted to supplement each other in the conquest of the
world. They possess between them now nearly half of it, and if they can
only agree between themselves to let the one have the whole of Asia and
Continental Europe and the other all the rest, then possibly will the
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Millennium be
ushered in and, with the Bear and the Lion in loving embrace, mankind
may enjoy everlasting peace.
But will the God of History, the Destiny which
guides the world's progress, permit such a travesty of the world's
civilization, such a mockery of the world's advancement, to accomplish
itself in the twentieth century? I cannot believe It. I think that this
hand of Destiny is preparing something better, in fact has prepared
something better, something which shall emerge triumphant from this
great struggle of the nations and, chastened and refined thereby, will,
by its example and influence, point the way for the development of man.
The present organization, economic and political, of
the German Empire, which also bears in its constitution the more
significant title of the United States of Germany, is in very many
important respects the opposing counterpart of that of the British
United Kingdom and Colonial Empire. Its economic system is by far the
most efficient, most
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genuinely
democratic which exists at the present moment in the world, or has ever
existed. There is no great state in the world today in which there is
so general and even a distribution of the fruits of civilization,
spiritual and material, among all the people as in the United States of
Germany. And there is no state, great or small, in which the general
plane of civilization is so high. Education is universal and illiteracy
is completely stamped out; there are no slums, no proletariat, and no
pauperism; prosperity is universal; and the sense of duty is the
governing principle of life, public and private, from the highest to
the lowest. The institutions of the country are adapted and adjusted to
bring each individual person into the place and sphere for which he or
she is best capacitated, thus avoiding loss by the abrasions of
economic friction.
First and most fundamental of all, German
agriculture has been systematically developed, improved, and protected
until it has reached the highest point of productive-
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ness known to
the world. It is a land of small proprietors, where relatively few
great estates exist and where the relatively few tenant farmers hold
leases of communal land rather than of land in private ownership.
Forests are preserved for furnishing wood and lumber and protecting the
water courses, but pasture land is limited and the greatest possible
area is kept under the plow. Fostered by law, pursued with intelligence
and individual interest, and enriched by science, the German
agriculture is so intensive that one acre of German land produces as
much as three acres of Russian land, although originally poorer and
more difficult to cultivate. Feed the people with home product, has
been the first principle of the German economic system. With two
hundred and eight thousand square miles of territory, an area not as
great as our single State of Texas, the United States of Germany can
produce all the food absolutely necessary to sustain seventy millions
of people. The German Empire does not thus absolutely
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require
colonies for her food necessities, nor does it need the rent from city
houses to keep up its farms and country estates. In Germany the country
supports the city more than the city supports the country.
Upon this natural and healthy foundation for their
economic system, consciously and tenaciously preserved, the Germans
have built their manufactures and their commerce. They have built these
carefully, scientifically, and with unwearying industry. They have not
allowed factory life to make slums of their cities, nor to produce a
proletariat. By requiring employers to contribute with the state and
the employees to the establishment of insurance and pension funds, they
have secured to labor its proper share in the wealth produced. And by
enlisting the personal interest of the employees in the excellence of
their own work, they have brought the products of their manufactures to
such a degree of perfection that wherever they are admitted they
compete successfully with those of any other country.
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German commerce therefore is not dependent upon vast colonial
possessions. Depots, coaling, and supply stations, of course, it must
have, and a strong navy for its protection against the robbers of the
sea, but Germany does not find it necessary to her existence to be
continually grabbing the territory of the world for colonial markets.
The open door is all Germany needs, with the excellence of her
manufactures and the efficiency of her commerce and methods of trade,
to assure her indefinite iIndustrial expansion. Her economic system is
thus not the system of a land-grabbing empire. In the twenty years of
her wonderful industrial development between the years 1890 and 1910,
she acquired less than two thousand square miles of foreign territory,
while Great Britain acquired nearly two million, Russia almost as much,
France six to eight hundred thousand, Belgium a million, and even the
United States of America about one hundred and fifty thousand, and
while Germany acquired the bits of this small area. In about
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every case, by
purchase or lease, all the other countries seized most, if not all, of
their gains by military conquest.
Let us now turn to the German political system and
mark its points of difference from that of the British Empire. In the
first place it is a federal union of self-governing States. Such a
system requires a written constitution to delimit with necessary
exactness the relative governmental spheres of the Central Government
and the States of the Union. The German political system is founded
upon such a Constitution, which was framed by representatives of the
governments of the several States, adopted by a convention of popular
delegates chosen by universal manhood suffrage, and ratified by the
legislatures of the different States.
Besides distributing all governmental power between
the Imperial Government and the States of the Union, it distributes the
powers of the Imperial Government between the legislature and the
executive, conferring upon the Imperial Legislature
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— a body the
members of one house of which are chosen by universal manhood suffrage
and direct election, while those of the other are appointed by the
States of the Union — the power to make the laws, and upon the
executive, the Emperor, the power to execute the laws or rather to
supervise the execution of the laws. The German Government is thus
constitutionally limited government, limited politically by the
distribution of governmental powers between the Imperial Government and
the States of the Union and by the distribution of the powers of the
Imperial Government between the legislature and the executive, and
limited judicially by the bills of individual rights in each of the
State constitutions and by the fixing of certain of the fundamental
duties and rights of the individual in the Imperial Constitution. One
among these duties, which must also be regarded as a fundamental right,
is the constitutional requirement upon every able-bodied male German to
bear arms, and the fixing of the time for which his services are
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or may be
required, which also means beyond which they may not be required. I
call this a right as well as a duty. In the Constitution of the United
States of America it is so treated, and is declared as follows: "A
well-regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state,
the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed."
It is the German way to put the duty first and treat the right as the
attending incident. This is the keynote to the German character,
political and economic as well as private. The rights guaranteed to the
individual by this constitutional provision requiring universal
military service are that there shall be no professional army separate
from the general citizenship of the Empire with separate interests from
those of that citizenship, no inability on the part of that general
citizenship, springing from ignorance of the use of arms, to cope with
any arbitrary use by government of military power, and that there shall
be no power in the Government to require more than the Constitution
prescribes.
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The so-called German militarism turns out, thus, when correctly
understood, to be not only a popular duty but a popular right of the
most fundamental and, for Germany, most essential character. It
originated in the great efforts of Prussia to rid the German States of
the invasions of the first Napoleon. Its spirit and purpose were,
therefore, at the outset, defensive, and the point of that defense was
first turned against France. But the expulsion of the French from
German soil was accomplished by the aid of Russia. Russia was, thereby,
introduced into Germany and her influence over the politics of middle
Europe became balefully paramount.
In the latter half of the century Russia's so-called
Pan-Slavic plans, the plans for the disruption of the Ottoman Empire
and the conquest of Constantinople, began to take form, and Germany now
found itself compelled to defend middle Europe against the peril
threatening it from the east as well as from the west, and this has
been its mission to the present day. Down to August 1, 1914,
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German
diplomacy, backed by German militarism, had been able to keep the peril
from the east and the peril from the west apart and to give to
Continental Europe such a period of peace and prosperity as it had
never before enjoyed, but on that eventful day British diplomacy
triumphed over German diplomacy and brought the two perils together and
sealed the union by British determination to destroy the naval and
commercial power of Germany.
German militarism is, thus, when properly
understood, seen to be democratic and defensive. It is the only kind of
militarism compatible with popular liberty and constitutional
government. It is the permanent, professional army in rank and file
which, on the other hand, is dangerous to liberty at home and given to
adventure abroad. Moreover, German militarism has been so developed and
regulated as to prove rather an economic advantage than an economic
burden. This is owing to the fact that the German army is not simply an
organization
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for drill,
discipline, and fighting, but that it is also a school of general
physical culture, through which the average life of German men has been
increased by ten years and their average capacity for any kind of work
by twenty-five per cent; that it is a school of intellectual culture in
which, besides military drill and tactics, mathematics, engineering,
physics, geography, and sanitation are taught to all the men; that it
is a school of moral culture which prevents demoralization and
dissoluteness in the young men at the most critical age; that it is a
school of politeness in which rudeness of manners gives way to habits
of courtesy; and that it is a school of genuine patriotism through
which the spirit of provincialism is made to yield to national loyalty.
These educational and practical compensations overbalance the economic
burden of German militarism and distinguish it from the militarism of
Russia and France, although they are all based upon the same principle
of universal military service. The system of commandership is, also,
much
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less
autocratic than in the military systems of Great Britain, Russia, or
France. The participation in the same by the executive heads of the
different States of the Union and the exclusive power of the Federal
Council, the upper house of the legislature, to authorize a declaration
of war, give the German system a constitutional character and
limitation which the others do not possess at all.
Finally, the German communal and local governmental
organization is the most perfect known to modern politics. It began its
modern development about a hundred years ago with the municipal system
of Stein, and was completed with what is known as the Kreis-ordnung,
the provincial and district organization, to which we may attach the
name of von Gneist, though others participated in its creation. Under
it the most honest, efficient, and prosperous communal life which the
world has ever known has been produced and developed. No slums, no
illiteracy, and no proletariat are to be found in any German city or
commune, while the control is more
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genuinely
democratic and the distribution of the fruits of civilization is more
even and general than what prevails in any other country.
To me the attempt made in Great Britain and the
United States to represent Heinrich
von Treitschke as the fashioner of
German institutions and policies seems, to say the least, disingenuous.
I knew von Treitschke well. He was my teacher, and I felt great
admiration for his brilliant rhetorical powers and his enthusiastic
nationalism. I never took him very seriously, and I never knew that
anybody else did. He said a great many sound and sensible things and
some extravagant things. The sound things are, however, never quoted
now, but his extravaganzas are developed into caricatures. He was a man
largely shut away from practical personal intercourse with the world by
his extreme deafness, and was a prey to his own imagination. I remember
distinctly a conversation with him in the year 1878, in which he told
me that orthodox political economy was not
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then well
represented in the Berlin University, that a young teacher named Adolf
Wagner, with socialistic leanings, was guiding the students astray, and
that the Faculty of Philosophy In the University had requested him,
Treitschke, to deliver a course of lectures on political economy as an
offset to Wagner's influence and that he was preparing the course. But
those of us who are acquainted with German institutions know now that
Germany has followed Wagner, rather than von Treitschke, in the
development of its economic institutions, and that the democratic
socialistic system of pensions and insurance, through which a more even
distribution of wealth between capital and labor has been attained in
Germany than elsewhere, is to be attributed, in large part at least, to
Wagner and not at all to von Treitschke. And yet I have not seen the
name of Adolf Wagner mentioned a single time in any American newspaper
since the outbreak of this war.
Neither had von Treitschke any more influence upon
the development of the political
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institutions
of the Empire than of the economic institutions. As I remember him, he
was a member of the National Liberal party, and a staunch Unionist; but
the leader of the party at that time was Edward Lasker,
who certainly
did a vast deal more than von Treitschke in forming its principles and
policies and in securing the legislation which that party left upon the
statute book of the Empire; and yet I have never seen the mention of
Edward Lasker's name in any American newspaper since the outbreak of
this war. The man, however, who, after the formation of the Empire,
exercised, next to Bismarck himself, the largest influence upon the
development of Germany's political and judicial institutions was Rudolf
von Gneist, Professor and Rector in the Berlin University, chairman
of
the Judiciary Committee in the Reichstag, and teacher of Prince
William, now the German Emperor, in political science and public law. I
knew this man well also. I attended his lectures and worked in his
seminar. He was a great student of English
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and American
institutions. He spent years in England investigating the working of
the British Government from highest to lowest instance. He wrote the
two monumental works: The Administrative Law of England and Self
Government in England, and it was under the influence of the
principles put forth in these that local administration in Germany has
been modified and reformed in no inconsiderable degree. Moreover, it
was Professor von Gneist who contended that the German imperial courts
had, from the nature of written constitutional law, the power to
nullify any legislative act they might be called upon to apply, which,
in their opinion, contravened the provisions of the Constitution, one
of the most fundamental principles of genuine constitutional
government, as we Americans well know. And yet I have never seen the
name of Professor von Gneist mentioned in any American newspaper since
the outbreak of this war.
Everything has been done, and done systematically,
and done according to a seem-
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ingly
long-matured and sinister plan to give the American people not simply
an erroneous, but an absolutely false, conception of German
institutions, purposes, and aspirations. But all this is vain and
futile, short-sighted and injurious. As Lincoln said, "You can fool all
the people some of the time and some of the people all the time, but
you cannot fool all the people all of the time." The Destiny which
rules this world will sooner or later sweep away this veil of
falsehood, deceit, and hypocrisy and will place that one of the two
systems I have described in the van of civilization's onward march
which will bring to mankind as a whole the largest store of the fruits
of civilization, most evenly distributed among all the members of the
human race.
This might, conceivably, be accomplished through
peaceable development, but in the past it has been chiefly done through
the upheavals of war. And it may be that this is just what is happening
now. It may be that mankind is now being called upon to make its
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selection, or,
more correctly, to see the selection made for it through the mighty
events now transpiring, between the two systems above delineated: on
the one hand, the system of the Colonial Empire, with its upper ten
thousand rolling in wealth, splendor, and luxury and its hundreds of
thousands, nay millions, groveling in ignorance, want, misery and
crime; with its grip upon a quarter of the earth's land surface and a
quarter of mankind of all races and colors as its subjects; with its
continual territorial expansion through intrigue, war, and bloodshed;
with its sovereignty over the high seas and a vast naval power to
sustain it, which may, at any moment, shut up the ports of any other
country and cut it off from any communication with the outside world,
and, in many cases, starve it into submission to its will; with its
unlimited government in the hands of a small group of men responsible
only to a little larger group, a small group of men who do not hesitate
to commit the Empire in secret agreements and under-
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standings of
the most momentous nature; and with its necessity to destroy by force
any successful rival in the world's trade; or, on the other hand, the
system of national states of moderate and substantially permanent areas
and of homogeneous populations; with constitutionally limited
government participated in, through the federal system, by the
representative men of every section; with a fair distribution of the
fruits of civilization so that there shall be no illiteracy, no
pauperism and little crime; with agriculture and industry so developed
and balanced that each nation may substantially provide itself with the
necessities of life; with manufactures which, by their excellence
alone, will command markets; with no compelling necessity, therefore,
for colonies and dependencies nor for wars through which to acquire
them; and with the whole world as an open field where intelligence,
capacity, honesty, and industry will not be cheated by brute force of
their just reward.
Which of these systems now is the system
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for the
twentieth century? Which will lead mankind to the higher plane of
civilization? Which is best calculated to give mankind prosperity and
peace? I divine that this is the great problem for the solution of
which Europe is now writhing in the agony of a great labor pain of
human development, and while God grant that we may escape active
participation in the suffering, we cannot avoid having our own
interests most profoundly involved in the outcome. Let us make sure
that we correctly conceive what those interests are and how they will
be best subserved.
Last update: August 11th, 2014
