JOHN WILLIAM BURGESS
THE EUROPEAN WAR OF 1914
Its
Causes, Purposes, and Probable Results
1915
CHAPTER IV
p. 113—154
113
CHAPTER IV
AMERICAN INTERESTS IN THE OUTCOME OF THE WAR
I SEE the prophecy so often expressed that
something terrible may come to us and to the world through German
Militarism, while British Navalism passes almost unchallenged, that I
wonder whether one of the qualities of the prophet is that he is
constituted without memory. I do not think that I possess any of the
qualities of the prophet, certainly not the one just mentioned, for I
find myself always going back a few steps in order to get direction and
momentum for every new spring forward. After all, this seems to me the
surer way. It certainly is when there is such rich experience from
which to draw as there is upon the subject of our relation to German
Militarism and British Navalism.
We may say that our experience with both begins with
and extends through our exist-
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ence here. In
our Colonial Period almost the entire western border of our country was
occupied by Germans. It fell to them, therefore, to defend, in first
instance, the colonists from the attacks of the French and the Indians.
They formed what was known in those times as the Regiment of Royal
Americans, a brigade rather than a regiment, numbering some four
thousand men, and the bands led by Nicholas Herkimer
and Conrad Weiser.
Many of the men composing these bodies had been schooled in military
tactics and discipline in their German fatherland and the service which
they rendered in creating, organizing, and drilling this little army of
some six thousand men cannot be overestimated. It enabled us to resist
successfully the French and their Indian allies in the Seven Years War,
which they made upon us from 1756 to 1763, and it gave us a nucleus for
our Revolutionary Army. At the outbreak of our War of Independence,
Herkimer, Mühlenberg, and Schlatter gathered the Germans in the
Mohawk Valley and the Vir-
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ginia Valley
together and organized them into companies for service. Baron
von Ottendorff, another German soldier, recruited and drilled the
famous Armand Legion. And when Washington's first bodyguard was
suspected of treasonable sentiments and plans, it was dismissed and a
new bodyguard consisting almost entirely of Germans was formed. This
new bodyguard was supported by a troop of cavalry consisting entirely
of Germans, under the command of Major Barth von Heer, one of Frederick
the Great's finest cavalry officers. This troop stood by Washington
during the entire war, and twelve of them escorted him to Mt. Vernon
when he retired.
But the greatest contribution of German Militarism
to the cause of our independence was Baron
von Steuben, the famous aide de camp of Frederick the Great. He
came to us at the most critical period of the Revolution, that awful
winter of 1777-78, when the remnant of our forces, a small band of
ragged, starved, and discouraged militiamen,
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were trying to
keep body and soul together at Valley Forge. He shared their
sufferings. He introduced the Prussian organization, discipline, and
drill among them. In a few months he made a real army out of them,
which turned defeat into victory and made our independence possible. He
then proceeded to the south and organized and disciplined the army for
General Greene. He was present at the siege of Yorktown, and, as the
only American officer who had ever witnessed the storming of a
fortified place, he rendered most invaluable service, and it was his
fortune to be in command in the trenches when the British flag was
hauled down.
And besides Steuben, there were Baron de Kalb,
the most brilliant cavalry officer; Johann Schott, the most efficient
artillery officer; General Lutterloh, the quartermaster general, and
Christopher Ludwig, the master purveyor, all Germans, who had had the
training of German Militarism. It is not too much to say that German
Militarism
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did probably
as much as any other one thing to make our final triumph over Great
Britain in our war for independence possible.
But we have had another and more recent war for our
National existence: the war of 1861-65, the Civil War, as we of the
North called it; the War between the States, as they of the South
called it. Let us see if German Militarism played any part in that
great struggle, and if so, what that part was.
Everyone, even only slightly acquainted with the
history of this war, knows that the question of first and greatest
importance which arose and demanded solution was that of the position
in the struggle of the border slave States, namely: Maryland, Kentucky,
and Missouri. Mr. Lincoln's administration gave its attention most
seriously and anxiously to the work of holding these States back from
passing secession ordinances, and preventing them from being occupied
by the armies of the Southern Confederacy.
The most important among these States was Missouri.
It was the largest; it reached
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away up into
the very heart of the North; it commanded the left bank of the
Mississippi for some five hundred miles; and the great United States
arsenal of the West, containing the arms and munitions for that whole
section of our country, was located in St. Louis. It had been stacked
to its utmost capacity by the Secretary of War of the preceding
administration, Mr. Floyd of Virginia, in the expectation that it would
certainly fall into the hands of the South. The Governor of the State, C. F.
Jackson, manifested the stand he would take in his
reply to President Lincoln's requisition for Missouri's quota of the
first call for troops. He defied the President in the words: "Your
requisition, in my judgment, is illegal, unconstitutional, and
revolutionary in its object; inhuman and diabolical, and cannot be
complied with."
It happened most fortunately, however, that the
commandant of the arsenal was a staunch Unionist, Nathaniel Lyon.
He
immediately recognized the peril of the situation. He had only three
men to guard the
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arsenal and
there was in the city a full company of secessionist militia calling
themselves Minute Men. Moreover, two companies of the state militia
composed of Germans had shortly before been disarmed by the general of
the State militia. Under these conditions Lyon turned to F. P.
Blair
for advice. Blair was acquainted with the views and sympathies of the
inhabitants perfectly, and knew that he could rely only upon the
Germans to save the arsenal and then the city and the State for the
Union.
The Germans of the city were organized in
Turner-Unions, in which they had, besides practicing gymnastics, kept
up their knowledge of military drill and evolutions. After some
hesitation, during which the movements of the secessionists to seize
the arsenal became more and more threatening, Lyon called the German
Turners into the arsenal, armed them thoroughly and garrisoned the
place with them. Five regiments of Germans were now hastily organized
and armed. They were the regiments commanded by Blair,
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Börnstein,
Sigel, Schüttner, and Salomon. The arsenal and city were now safe,
and some thirty thousand stands of arms with munitions were sent over
into Illinois to arm the Illinois troops for the occupation of
Missouri. This was the first great service which German Militarism
rendered to the cause of the Union in the perilous month of April, 1861.
It would fill a volume to recite the services which
followed this throughout those terrible four years, during which Union
was preserved and slavery destroyed. Without the Germans, who almost to
a man knew military drill, discipline, and organization, I do not know
how we could have prepared our armies for the work which they were
called upon to do. The people of the North were unaccustomed to the use
of arms, knew little of military organization, and were restive under
discipline. We had our Westpointers and they were good, but far too few
in number to train the vast hosts of raw recruits which were now called
under arms. The
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two hundred
thousand native born Germans who served in our armies were nearly all
of them experienced in the use of arms and accustomed to the severities
of military discipline. A very large proportion of these were engaged
as officers in teaching our men to become soldiers. Among the taught
were nearly four hundred thousand men of German descent, many of whom,
through their practices in their Turn-and-Schützen Hallen, were
the quickest of all our volunteers to become efficient soldiers.
The German and German-American contingent in our
armies amounted thus, first and last, to some five hundred thousand
soldiers. They were led by men such as Heinzelman, Rosecrans, Schurz,
Sigel, Osterhaus, Willich, Hartranft, Steinwehr, Wagner, Hecker, and a
thousand others. Mrs. Jefferson Davis, the wife of the Confederate
President, has often said to me that without the Germans the North
could never have overcome the armies of the Confederacy; and unless
that had been accomplished then, this Continent
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would have
been, since then, the theater of continuous war instead of the home of
peace.
Now let us contrast with these great services of
German Militarism to our independence and our National existence, the
injuries which British Navalism, to say nothing of British Militarism,
has inflicted upon us.
We will begin with the Declaration of Independence,
as I suppose it is still in order to cite that document in these United
States. In it we meet the following statements: "He," that is the King,
the British Government, "has plundered our seas, ravaged our coasts,
burnt our towns, cut off our trade with all parts of the world."
Perhaps the opinion of the day may hold that we were then his own and
he could do with us as he would. I will, therefore, not dwell longer
upon the treatment which we received from the British Government during
our Colonial period.
No sooner had we become by successful resistance
independent of Great Britain than she began harassing us in every
possible way
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upon the sea,
legally and illegally. Her war ships stopped our merchantmen, no matter
where they were going or what they were carrying, and not only took
what their officers termed contraband of war out of them, but took our
crews out of them and impressed them into the British naval service
under the claim that they were British citizens, which, in most cases
at least, was not true, and whether they were or not, they could not be
lawfully taken from American ships. The British Navy went so far in
this matter, as to stop by force our own war ships and search them for
British seamen, and in several cases, notably in that of our frigate,
the Chesapeake,
June 22, 1807, actually took men out of our war ships and impressed
them into the service of the British Navy.
At that time Great Britain was off-and-on engaged in
war with France, and during such periods had, of course, the right to
blockade the French ports and those of the allies of France. But there
was a law of blockade which required as the condition of this situa-
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tion that
armed vessels in sufficient power to repel ordinary attempts to enter
must be present before the port blockaded and notice must have been
given of the actual existence of the blockade. Great Britain paid no
attention to these limitations. She declared all the ports of France,
of her allies, and of her colonies blockaded, whether they were so or
not, and seized American vessels, among others, far out upon the high
seas under the claim that they were headed for ports declared by Great
Britain to be in a state of blockade, or had upon them goods the
product or manufacture of countries at enmity with Great Britain. The
British Government also issued the entirely arbitrary order that trade
between a country and its colonies, not permitted to the ships of other
nations in time of peace, could not be opened to them by that country
in time of war between that country and another power. For twenty
years, from 1792 to 1812, Great Britain imposed upon us all of these
practices, unlawfully, arbitrarily, and arrogantly until
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finally we
could stand it no longer and we threw down the gage of battle.
The war began for us rather successfully, almost
brilliantly, on the water. Our improvised Navy did at first excellent
work, but at the beginning of 1814 we had hardly a vessel of any kind
left upon the sea. The British fleet had, moreover, from its Government
the explicit and distinctly expressed order "to destroy and lay waste
all towns and districts of the United States found accessive to the
attack of the British armaments," and it followed these instructions
effectively. From the Bay of Fundy to the Chesapeake our ports were
blockaded and our towns reduced to ashes, and finally the City of
Washington was captured by the expedition up the Chesapeake, and the
Capitol, the President's Mansion, and the public buildings were
plundered and burned to the ground. When we emerged from the war of
1812-15 we had neither navy nor merchant marine and in the Treaty of
Peace, Great Britain renounced none of her
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arbitrary
practices upon the sea. The war brought little relief from the tyranny
of British Navalism.
During the next forty years we constructed slowly
and with much difficulty our new Navy and merchant marine, and in 1860
there was again some prospect of our becoming a maritime power. Then
came the outbreak of the Civil War and Great Britain saw again her
opportunity to reduce us once more to weakness. Hardly a month passed
before she recognized the belligerency of the Southern Confederacy. The
Confederacy had no navy, but it had licensed some privateers, which,
during the first few months of the rebellion, made capture of a
considerable number of our merchantmen. In a very short time, however,
these privateers were all either captured by the vessels of the United
States Navy or were shut up in the southern ports by the quite
effective blockade. There was no probability, therefore, that any
foreign power would be brought into any contact whatever with the
Confederacy and
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no need,
therefore, of recognizing it as belligerent, or as anything.
When Mr. Charles
Francis Adams, our newly appointed Minister to Great Britain,
arrived at Liverpool on May 13, 1861, he was met by this declaration of
recognition by the British Government of the belligerency of the
Southern Confederacy. He saw at a glance that Lord Palmerston's
Government "desired," as Mr. Gladstone afterwards expressed it, "the
severance" — that is the separation of our country — "as a diminution
of a dangerous power." It looked to Mr. Adams as if the British
recognition of the independence of the Confederacy might follow
at any moment. The anti-Slavery sentiment in England upon which he had
counted seemed utterly eclipsed by something else and that something he
soon found to be nothing more elevated than commercial greed.
The British Government and the British nation were
possessed by the prospect of monopolizing the trade and commerce of
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the
cotton-raising Southern Confederacy and had neither eye nor ear for
anything else. Such motives usually seek to hide themselves behind some
profession of virtue or some violent indignation at the claimed
iniquity of others. Mr. Adams found this American iniquity with which
the British Government and public were deadening the consciousness of
their real purpose to be the caricature of the personalities of Mr.
Lincoln and Mr. Seward. Mr. Henry Adams, the Minister's son and Private
Secretary, wrote:
London created a nightmare of its own, and gave it
the shape of Abraham Lincoln. Beside this it placed another demon, if
possible more devilish, and called it Mr. Seward. In regard to these
two men English society seemed demented. Defense was useless;
explanation was vain; one could only let the passion exhaust itself.
One's best friends were as unreasonable as enemies, for the belief in
poor Mr. Lincoln's brutality and Mr. Seward's ferocity became a dogma
of popular Faith. ... The London Times and all its satellites
were as usual doing the yellow work for the Foreign Sec-
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retary,
printing every morning in great head lines the words: "Another
Disastrous Federal Defeat;" and the Cabinet Ministers were calling
gleefully to each other that "the Federals had got another licking."
The first real opportunity came to show their
official animus in the Trent affair in
November of 1861. Our Captain Wilkes had read his international law
concerning contraband of war in British textbooks and supposed that he
had both British principle and British precedent for taking the
Confederate Envoys, Mason and Slidell, out of the British merchantmen,
the Trent, and conveying them upon his own ship as prisoners to
Boston. He had made the little mistake of not bringing the Trent
along too and delivering ship and Envoys to the jurisdiction of a prize
court of the United States. It was enough, however, in the existing
temper of the British Government to lead to demonstrations.
So soon as the news of Wilkes' act arrived in
England, although Mr. Adams
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communicated
to the British Government instructions to him from Washington
disavowing responsibility for the act and expressing readiness to
discuss the matter, preparations for war were instantly begun. The
arsenals resounded with activity and troops were embarked for America.
We liberated the Confederate Envoys promptly and the British Government
was obliged to see this opportunity escape them.
Mr. Adams and the Washington Government knew,
however, from that moment onward the hostile disposition which they
would be compelled to encounter at every point. It was entirely evident
to Mr. Adams that the British Government, led by Palmerston, Russell,
and Gladstone, were working, and would work, on the assumption that the
Southern Confederacy was a fait accompli. He undoubtedly
conveyed this information to Mr. Seward, who sent over our most
accomplished politician, Thurlow Weed, and our most accomplished
lawyer, William M. Evarts, to convince the
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politicians
and the people of their mistaken opinion and to assist Mr. Adams in
avoiding the legal pitfalls which might be laid for him. He needed them
both.
Already during the months when the controversy over
the Trent affair was taking its course, one James D. Bulloch arrived in
England as the agent of the Southern Confederacy for securing the
construction and equipment of a Confederate Navy. The laws of Great
Britain were construed to permit this, by the simple subterfuge of
keeping the vessel and the armament separate until they passed the
territorial limit of the British jurisdiction. And the British
Government did not recognize any international law outside of the Acts
of Parliament or specific treaty obligations.
In spite of the protests of Mr. Adams that Great
Britain was at least violating the obligations of neutrality in
permitting ships of war to be constructed in her ports for the
Confederates, who, according to Great Britain's own conception of the
belligerency
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of the
Confederates, were our enemies, the British Government allowed the work
to go on, until a number of cruisers of the most formidable type were
built and equipped and let loose upon the merchant marine of the United
States for its destruction, and they destroyed it pretty effectually to
the advantage of the British carrying trade upon the high seas.
Encouraged by the success of their own arbitrariness
and our inability to meet it under the strain of our domestic conflict,
the British Government became more and more reckless and arrogant. In
the year 1863, the Lairds at Birkenhead constructed a number of steam
rams, completely equipped, inside of the jurisdiction of the British
Government, for the Confederates. Mr. Adams protested to Lord Russell
with all the vigor of his vigorous nature, but at first in vain. In the
midst of the controversy, however, came the news of Gettysburg and
Vicksburg. Taking advantage of the influence of these victories over
the minds of the British
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Ministers and
upon the opinion of the British public, Mr. Adams addressed his famous
note of September 5, 1863, to Lord Russell, in which he distinctly
accused the British Government with connivance in the Confederate
armaments, and closed his communication with the words: "It would be
superfluous in me to point out to your Lordship that this is war." This
was something which the British Government understood, and three days
afterwards Mr. Adams received from Lord Russell information that his
Government had given instructions forbidding the departure of the two
Ironclads.
This did not, however, serve to quiet the
indignation of the people of the United States against the British
Government and people, and the desire to make stiff demands upon that
Government and back them up with the great military power with which
the Union emerged from the Civil War was very general and very
pronounced. The British Government saw that we were in earnest and gave
consent to a treaty with
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us in January,
1869, which the Senate of the United States regarded as no sufficient
promise of redress for the injuries done us, and promptly rejected it.
In his message to Congress of December 6, 1869,
President Grant denounced this proposed agreement most unsparingly. He
said:
Towards the close of the last administration a
convention was signed in London for the settlement of all outstanding
claims between Great Britain and the United States, which failed to
receive the advice and consent of the Senate to its ratification. The
time and the circumstances attending the negotiations of that treaty
were unfavorable to its acceptance by the people of the United States,
and its provisions were wholly inadequate for the settlement of the
grave wrongs that had been sustained by this government, as well as by
its citizens. The injuries resulting to the United States by reason of
the course adopted by Great Britain during our late Civil War in the
increased rates of insurance, in the diminution of exports and imports
and other obstructions to domestic industry and production, in its
effect upon the foreign commerce of the country, in the decrease and transfer
to Great Britain of
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our
commercial marine,* in the prolongation of the war and the
increased cost, both in treasure and in lives, of its suppression,
could not be adjusted and satisfied as ordinary commercial claims which
continually arise among commercial nations; and yet the convention
treated them as such ordinary claims, from which they differ more
widely in the gravity of their character than in the magnitude of their
amount, great even as is that difference. Not a word was found in the
treaty, and not an inference could be drawn from it to remove the sense
of the unfriendliness of the course of Great Britain in our struggle
for existence, which had so deeply and universally impressed itself
upon the people of this country. Believing that a convention thus
misconceived in its scope and inadequate in its provisions would not
have produced the hearty, cordial settlement of pending questions which
alone is consistent with the relations which I desire to have firmly
established between the United States and Great Britain, I regard the
action of the Senate in rejecting the treaty to have been wisely taken
in the interests of peace and as a necessary step in the direction of a
perfect and cordial friendship between the two countries. A sensitive
people, conscious of their power, are more at ease under a great wrong
wholly unatoned than under the re-
* Italics mine, J. W. B.
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straint
of a settlement which satisfies neither their idea of justice nor their
grave sense of the grievances they have sustained.
Great Britain practically ignored this complaint,
and another year slipped by with the relations between the two
countries becoming more strained, when President Grant, on December 5,
1870, made the following communication to Congress:
I regret to say that no conclusion has been
reached for the adjustment of the claims against Great Britain growing
out of the course adopted by that government during the Rebellion. The
cabinet of London, so far as its views have been expressed, does not
appear to be willing to concede that Her Majesty's Government was
guilty of any negligence, or did or permitted any act during the war by
which the United States has just cause of complaint. Our firm and
unalterable convictions are directly the reverse. I, therefore,
recommend to Congress to authorize the appointment of a commission to
take proof of the amount and the ownership of these several claims, on
notice to the representative of Her Majesty at Washington, and that
authority be given for the settlement of these claims
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by the
United States, so that the government shall have the ownership of the
private claims, as well as the responsible control of all the demands
against Great Britain.
The President had chosen well the moment to give
Great Britain this warning. The French Empire was in the dust and the
German Armies had surrounded Paris. With the well-known friendship
existing between Germany and the United States this was no time for
Great Britain to risk continuance of the misunderstanding with us.
Early in January of 1871 a special envoy from the British Government,
Sir John Rose, appeared In Washington. The result of the negotiations
springing out of this advance was the Treaty of Washington of 1871
between Great Britain and the United States, according to which all the
questions arising out of the contentions between Great Britain and the
United States concerning the incidents of the Civil War should be
referred for arbitration to a Tribunal of five members, one appointed
by the President of the
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United States,
one by the Queen of Great Britain and Ireland, one by the King of
Italy, one by the President of Switzerland, and one by the Emperor of
Brazil; the question of the Northwest Boundary of the United States
should be referred to the German Emperor; and the Fisheries question to
a Board of three commissioners, one appointed by the President of the
United States, one by the British Queen, and the third by the President
and the Queen jointly, and in case they could not agree, by the
Austro-Hungarian Ambassador at the British Court.
When the Geneva Tribunal met and the United States
laid its claims before it, the British Government virtually declined to
submit to the arbitration of the claims for what were termed "National
and indirect losses," that is "losses in the transfer of the American
commercial marine to the British flag, in the enhanced payment of
insurance and in the prolongation of the war and the addition of a
large sum to the cost of the war
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and the
suppression of the Rebellion." The Tribunal announced that it felt
constrained to throw them out as not being a good foundation in
International Law for computing and awarding damages. The Tribunal
awarded us a very moderate sum for the reimbursement of direct private
losses, but the vastly greater national and indirect losses have never
been compensated or atoned for in the slightest degree.
The boundary question between the United States and
British Columbia submitted to the German Emperor was decided by His
Majesty in an award, announced in October of 1872, sustaining the claim
of the United States.
On the other hand, the fisheries
question presents another instance of British practices in
diplomacy. When it came to the appointment of the Commissioners, the
President appointed one, the British Government one, and the British
Government proposed, as the third member to be appointed by the two
governments conjointly, one Maurice Del-
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fosse, the
Belgian Minister to the United States. President Grant rejected
Delfosse on the ground that the interests of Great Britain and Belgium
were altogether too closely allied. Great Britain would not accept
anybody proposed by the United States, and so the choice of the third
Commissioner fell, according to the provisions of the Treaty, to the
Austro-Hungarian Ambassador at the British Court, Count Beust. He
should, of course, have been informed by the British Government that
Delfosse was excluded. Whether he was so informed we do not know, but
he, nevertheless, appointed him as the third Commissioner.
Our Government was taken by surprise, but Mr. Fish,
our Secretary of State, felt the embarrassment of resisting further the
appointment of the Belgian Minister in Washington to be too great and
acquiesced with the best grace possible. Great Britain had thus secured
two of the three Commissioners and they proceeded to award a
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payment of
five million five hundred thousand dollars from our Government to Great
Britain. It was a high-handed procedure and our Commissioner, Hon. E.
H. Kellogg, dissented vigorously from the decision, but they had the
letter of the law on us and we had to submit.
Thus three times in less than a hundred years of our
history has Great Britain destroyed our merchant marine, and we have
never yet recovered from the last experience. The competition which the
Germans began to set up in the seventies and eighties of the last
century proved a great relief to us. As the German merchant marine
grew, freights were reduced and the comfort of travel greatly improved,
and we were able to carry on our foreign trade and intercourse
profitably in foreign bottoms. But now, having decided that the
interests of her World-Empire can no longer suffer this competition.
Great Britain has struck down the German commerce and forbids us to buy
the interned ships with which to carry on
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our foreign
commerce, under pain of their seizure by the British Navy.
How many more instances do we need to demonstrate to
us that the system of Colonial Empire with the dominance of the seas,
and the unlimited territorial expansion which it claims, is not
compatible with the freedom and prosperity of the world? Can any
American with half an eye fail to see that our greatest interest in the
outcome of this war is that the seas shall become free and neutral, and
that, shall they need policing, this shall become international; that
the open door for trade and commerce shall take the place of colonial
restrictions or preferences, or influences and shall, in times of
peace, be the universal principle; that private property upon the high
seas shall be inviolable; that trade between neutrals in time of war
shall be entirely unrestricted, and that contraband of war shall have
an international definition?
In the second place, what American cannot see with
half an eye that the destruction
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of the German
Empire and the advance of Russia to the controlling place in
Continental Europe or even the lessening of the influence of the German
Empire to the advantage of Russia — one of which things is bound to
result from the triumph of the Allies in this war — would be injurious
to American interests and would conflict with American ideals? Leaving
out of account altogether the close educational bonds between Germany
and the United States, closer than those subsisting between us and any
other country, and the racial sympathies of a large part of our best
population, let us look at the more practical and material interests
involved.
In the first place, the German merchant marine
intermediates our commerce for us in larger volume than all the
countries of Continental Europe now at war with her, and has given us
more satisfactory service than any of them. And, in the second place,
the German trade with us exceeds in amount, by nearly fifty millions of
dollars annually,
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our trade with
France, Russia, Belgium, Servia, and Montenegro, the five Continental
European nations now at war with Germany, taken together.
Do we not wish to preserve this valuable trade?
Do we wish to see the paralyzing hand of the
Muscovite laid upon this rich source of income to us?
But some of our all-wise newspaper editors say the
German people will still be there, only the German Empire, as a
political and governmental organization, will be destroyed. But I doubt
very much if the German people will be there after the German Empire is
destroyed. I think they will stand or fall together, for the German
Empire is the national, self-ordained organization of the German people
and without it they themselves know that they could not exist as a
people in Middle Europe. They will uphold it so long as the breath of
life is in them and they will lie down in death wrapt in its colors
before they will
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submit to the
rule of the Slav, the Gaul, or the Briton.
I have, in the previous chapter, described briefly
what this German Empire as a governmental organization is, but to
impress it more deeply upon the minds of my readers, I will quote here
what President Grant said of it soon after its formation, in his
special message of February 7, 1871, to Congress:
The Union of the States of Germany into a form
of government similar in many respects to that of the American Union is
an event that cannot fail to touch deeply the sympathies of the people
of the United States.
This Union has been brought about by the
long-continued persistent efforts of the people, with the deliberate
approval of the governments and people of twenty-four* of the German
States through their regularly constituted representatives. In it the
American people see an attempt to reproduce in Europe some of the best
features of our own Constitution with such modifications as the history
and condition of Germany seem to require. The local governments of the
several members of
* Twenty- five, J. W. B.
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the
Union are preserved, while the power conferred upon the Chief imparts
strength for the purpose of self-defense, without authority to enter
upon wars of conquest and ambition.
The cherished aspiration for national unity which
for ages has inspired the many millions of people speaking the same
language, inhabiting a contiguous and compact territory, but
unnaturally separated and divided by dynastic jealousies and the
ambition of short-sighted rulers, has been attained, and Germany now
contains a population of about 34,000,000, united, like our own, under
one government for its relation with other powers, but retaining in its
several members the right and power of control of their local
interests, habits, and institutions.
The bringing of great masses of thoughtful and free
people under a single government must tend to make governments what
alone they should be — the representatives of the will and the
organization of the power of the people. The adoption in Europe of the
American system of union under the control and direction of a free
people, educated to selfrestraint, cannot fail to extend popular
institutions and to enlarge the peaceful influence of American ideas.
Such was the organization of the German Empire at
the outset and such it has remained
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to the present
day. In view of all these things, how can any genuine American, with
one grain of common sense and one spark of real patriotism left in him,
unless he be blinded by prejudice or consumed by hypocrisy, regard with
favor or even with unconcern the substitution of the Muscovite
autocracy for this Great German system of government and economy in
Central Europe, or the bringing of it in the slightest degree under the
influence of the Muscovite autocracy? What American interest could he
imagine to be advanced by it? What American idea to be furthered by it?
If such an American should present himself before me, I confess that I
would not know what to say to him; for, frankly speaking, it would seem
to me that he were ignoring American interests altogether under some
sinister foreign influence. To me it seems indisputable that every true
American interest, moral and material, requires the maintenance of the
German Empire in its present organization and power in Middle Europe.
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Neither the
veiled Autocracy of the East nor the Gallic Republic of the West can be
spoken of on the same day with it as the producer of genuine liberty,
real progress, and universal prosperity.
Finally, there is one more question of vast
importance to the people of these United States involved in the outcome
of this war. It is this, namely: What relation is the North American
Continent to bear hereafter to the diplomacy and wars of Europe?
We had a doctrine, which was intended and, in some
degree, calculated, to keep the American Continents out of European
entanglements. It was first employed to prevent Spain and Portugal from
reestablishing the colonial dependence of South and Middle America upon
Europe, and to prevent Russia from extending the dependence of North
America upon Europe. It certainly helped to accomplish the first.
Today, of the nine millions of square miles of territory of South and
Middle America inhabited by sixty millions of people, only about two
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hundred
thousand square miles, inhabited by less than five hundred thousand
people, are colonially dependent upon Europe.
It also accomplished its purpose in regard to the
second object. Nevertheless, more than the half of North America
territorially remains today colonially dependent upon Europe. We have
certainly been altruistic with our Monroe Doctrine.
We have turned and twisted and developed and exaggerated it to get
Europe out of South and Middle America, and yet we have permitted the
very European state, which has always professed to believe in it, to
hold on to the half of North America and to touch our own boundary for
more than three thousand miles. At the close of our Civil War we got
Russia off the Continent altogether by paying her seven millions of
dollars for what was then regarded as a huge iceberg, and it is
probably the greatest diplomatic and political blunder the United
States ever made that it did not then get Great Britain off too. The
population of Canada
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at that time
was only about three and a half millions of people, the majority of
whom, probably, were inclined to annexation to the United States.
Moreover, it had been brought quite clearly to our minds during our
Civil War how easily Canada might be made a base of military operations
against us. And lastly, we had at that moment the large, trained, and
disciplined Army of seasoned veterans with which we could have struck
down any physical opposition. It was an opportunity lost for freeing
the North American Continent from colonial relations to Europe, which
has never returned and may never return.
For more than twenty-five years, now, we have been
consoling ourselves with the idea that the bond between Canada and
Great Britain had become so attenuated that it might, at any moment, of
itself snap asunder. But to our great surprise, almost to our
consternation, we suddenly find that such is not the case, that, quite
to the contrary, Canada is not only involved in the diplomacy and
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politics of
Europe, but in a great European War. By her colonial relationship to
Great Britain she has been made belligerent in a European War and is
now therefore subject, lawfully, to all the incidents of this
condition, one of which is that she is open to invasion and conquest by
the enemies of Great Britain. This will not probably happen in this
war, but it can happen and it would be perfectly regular if it did, and
it will probably happen in the war between Russia and Great Britain,
which is certain to follow this war, in case the Allies are the
victors. Now if this thing should happen tomorrow or at any time, I
think it would put our neutrality to a very severe test. I would not be
willing to vouch for its maintenance. We have not yet formed any real
public opinion about this war. Everybody feels, but only relatively few
really think, and very few possess the knowledge upon which to found a
sound judgment. What we have now is a general state of excited feeling,
which expresses itself in epithet, vituperation, and abuse,
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which,
therefore, engenders the hatreds that lead to war. With such a state of
feeling the invasion of Canada by the enemies of Great Britain would in
all probability excite us, however irrationally, to abandon the neutral
ground, abandon peace, and become belligerent. Evidently the longer
continuance of any colonial relation of any part of North America to
Europe is not in our interests, not promotive of our welfare, and if
one of the results of this war could be the severing of this bond
completely, it would be so great a guarantee of our future peace and
prosperity that we could well bear all the losses and inconveniences
which the war is now imposing upon us.
But will this be effected by the triumph of the
Allies? I cannot believe it. It seems to me that the triumph of the
Allies will bind Canada still closer to the European and Asiatic policy
of Great Britain, through comradeship in the war, participation in
victory and through the increasing consciousness of the necessity for
the parts of the
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British Empire
to stand together against Russia in the final struggle for the
possession of Asia. And if Russia should win in this final struggle, as
I verily believe, with Germany and Austria-Hungary destroyed and with
Japan as her ally, she would, then Canada might be occupied by Russia
or Japan and be administered by a satrap from Petrograd or Tokio.
As I see it, only the maintenance of the German and
Austro-Hungarian Empires, in at least the strength and coherence which
they possessed on August 1, 1914, as the bulwark against Russian
advance westward and southward, will bring any peace to the world and
give to the North American Continent any prospect of ultimate
deliverance from entanglements in European politics, controversies, and
wars. There is little question in my mind that with the experience of
this war our next formulation of the Monroe Doctrine will be that there
shall be no colonial dependencies in North America on any European
power. This will be
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intelligible,
clear cut, and reach to the root of the matter. Its realization,
without the employment of force by us, will, however, be attained only
by Canada's being brought through the discouragement of defeat in this
present war to the consciousness of the un-American nature of her
present adventure and its dangers to the independence and welfare of
North America. These are the things which we should consider now. They
are the things which we will consider when we emerge from the stage of
emotion and advance into the stage of reflection.
Last update: August 11th, 2014
