England and Germany

CHAPTER VI

THE STATESMANSHIP OF THE ENTENTE

One of the most amazing phenomena of Entente statesmanship during the present European struggle, is the offhand readiness with which the Governments of France and Great Britain, yielding to abstract reasoning founded upon gratuitous assumptions, not only reversed the policy of centuries but committed themselves to a wholly new departure which was certain to raise up enemies to the Entente, to render its task immeasurably more arduous, and to lessen its means of achieving success. However well Russia deserved of her allies, however unquestionable her claim to the city of Constantine, no less suitable a moment could have been selected to press that claim than the spring of 1915. The only evidence we possess that the British statesmen primarily responsible for this capital blunder were conscious of the fateful character of this commitment, is the extreme care they took to have their responsibility shared by the members of the Opposition, which at that time was not represented in the Cabinet. But even with this indication before us, we cannot believe that even now this premature solution of a secular problem on lines suggested by transient episodes of a military campaign, has struck the responsible statesmen in proportion to its specific weight, the depth of its importance, and the nature of its consequences. To take but one of these, we find that towards the end of the second year of the campaign, Turkey is one of the two key-positions of the international situation. To conclude a separate peace with that Power is become a pressing, and would also be a feasible, task were it not that this earmarking of Constantinople for Russia constitutes an impassable barrier. No Turkish Cabinet would or could conclude a separate peace and strike up friendship with the nations that are making ready to deprive the Caliph of his capital. It would be a mistake, however, to assume that this premature allotment of Constantinople to Russia is the only obstacle to the conclusion of a separate peace with Turkey. There are also hindrances of a military nature which would have to be displaced before any decisive move in this direction could be expected of the young Turks.

But it cannot be gainsaid that the most formidable obstacle is that. Neither can it be questioned that that premature arrangement will, if the Allies emerge victorious from the ordeal, thrust into the foreground of practical politics a whole group of problems the most delicate and dangerous that were ever yet tackled by the inadequately equipped diplomacy of the Allied Governments. It is then that the Entente Powers will fully realize the deluge to which they made such haste to open the sluice-gates in the spring of 1915. And the only way practicable out of this blind alley would be the spontaneous abandonment by the Russian Government of the right it possesses, which however the Allies will certainly never call in question. Whether the Tsar’s Government believes such a sacrifice necessary, and whether, if they did, they could summon up the courage requisite to make it, are questions which Russia’s loyal allies have neither the right nor the wish to raise. We will carry out our obligations in the letter and the spirit. If the Russian people, in the person of their responsible organ, should renounce for the moment the claims which we have formally recognized and undertaken to enforce, this decision will have been come to spontaneously and without pressure or advice from their allies.

The extent to which the Teuton had his own way among the easy-going Russian people is hardly to be realized. It would be certainly inexplicable in an empire governed on national lines and conscious of its mission. For unlimited pliancy was the quality which German importunity evoked on the part of the highest authorities. One of many examples is worth recording. Among all industrial enterprises the Russian Government is most sensitive about that of high explosives. The manufacture of these they had always rigorously reserved for their own people, on obvious grounds. Well, the moment the Germans resolved to break down this barrier, they found the means to do it despite the objection raised by the Russian Press that it would be dangerous to confide the production of high explosives to foreigners and superlatively dangerous to confide it to prospective enemies. The prospective enemy carried the point, and the manufacture of high explosives was handed over to a German company, which built works for the purpose near the Russian capital, and had its headquarters and board of directors in Berlin!44

As in Italy, so in the Tsardom, one of the principal levers of Teuton interpenetration was the regulation of the national trade and industry. That is to say, these were allowed to subsist and thrive up to, but not beyond, the point at which they were useful as adjuncts of German enterprise. And the regulators were principally two: the Treaty of Commerce extorted from the Tsar’s Government during the embarrassments caused by the Manchurian campaign, and the German banks, which in the empire paraded as Russian, just as in Italy they were decked as Italian. Many of those financial institutions were but branches of German houses, and their methods were identical with those of the Banca Commerciale: long credits and easy modes of repayment offered to all those who agreed to deal with German firms, while discredit, ostracism, and ruin threatened the recalcitrant. And as Italian money and Italian institutions were employed as instruments of German interpenetration in foreign countries,45 so Russian funds and banks were used as helps to German interpenetration in Belgium and other lands.

A noteworthy instance of the ingenuity with which this intricate mechanism was worked came to light shortly before the outbreak of the war. In Brussels there was a branch of the Petrograd International Bank which purported to be a purely Russian concern. But once the Kaiser had sent his ultimatum to the Tsar’s Government, the Russian mask was doffed by the Brussels agency, which forthwith appeared in its true colours as a potent instrument of germanization in Belgium. There was found to be almost nothing Russian about the bank but the name. The staff, the language spoken, the methods of business, the political sympathies, the aims of the operations were all German. Out of the forty-three permanent members of the staff, thirty were German subjects, six Austrians, two German-Swiss, two Belgians, one was a Dutchman, one Turk, and there was a solitary Russian. The moment Count Berchtold presented his ultimatum to Serbia this “Russian” bank refused to change any Russian banknotes on any terms and let it be understood that they were valueless. A panic on the Belgian market was the immediate consequence. Russian travellers had to deposit their jewellery in pawn and pay exorbitant rates of interest on loans. The bank itself practised a kind of usury, and advanced only sixty per cent. of the face value of notes issued by the Imperial Bank of Russia. When the Belgian Government, after the declaration of war, began to tackle German espionage, this “Russian” bank was found to be one of the strongholds of the military spies. Certain of the employees were permanent agents of the German Military Attaché, and were at the same time inscribed as members of the staff of the Deutsche Bank of Berlin.

All those well-thought-out and successfully executed schemes may bear in upon the British people some notion of what is meant by German organization and co-ordination, and may also help them to gauge the chances of success, military, diplomatic and economic, on which the Allies, with their easy-going ways, their hope of somehow “blundering through,” and their lack of combination and of plan – can rely when pitted against a mighty organism, disposing of the most redoubtable forces ever created by human science and skill, directed by a single mind, and served with ascetic self-abnegation and religious ardour by over a hundred million people. The courage and faith of the Allies in gazing for years upon this portentous engine of destruction without making suitable provision for the day when it would be turned against themselves, will fill future generations with amazement.

No bare enumeration of details can convey an adequate idea of the vastness, compactness and potency of the German organization which kept the Russian Colossus partially paralysed at home, while the Kaiser’s armies were dealing it stunning blows on the battlefield. It is a revelation which will be followed by a new birth of the whole political world. The German colonists, the wandering German commercial travellers who acted as political spies, the various banks, joint-stock companies, religious sects, journals, reviews, schools, clubs, Lutheran pastors, and other Teuton agents, were but so many wheels and springs of the mighty machine which was set in motion and kept working by the political leaders in Berlin. For all these firms and enterprises and individuals from the Fatherland scattered over the length and breadth of the Tsardom were welded together in one vast organism by far-seeing politicians who canalized every important current of the nation’s life and imparted to it the direction which German interests required. No enterprise was too vast, no detail too trivial, for the attention of these moulders of Germany’s destinies.

All those activities, commercial, financial, industrial, journalistic, religious, political, the German mind combined into a single idea, the co-ordinate parts of which were studied and regulated, not by party chiefs, but by qualified experts, who, although specialists, subjected them to organic treatment. In this respect the German may be likened to a massive sombre figure who, surrounded by a crowd of sprightly shadowy nobodies, discoursing with easy frivolity on grave subjects, is engrossed with the task of destroying a great part of the frame-work of the world in order to rebuild it after his own plan. Unfortunately the extraordinary enlargement of interest which marks the latter-day political conceptions, and inspires the fateful action of Germany’s acknowledged leaders, breeds in the allied peoples not so much a stern resolve to tame that revolutionary nation at all costs, as a sentimental longing for the return of the idyllic past, and an illusive hope that by dint of mild Christian charity it may yet be brought back.

CHAPTER VII

TEUTON POLITICS

It is this Teutonic power of looking far ahead, this profundity of vision, this mingled comprehensiveness and concentration, and the marked success with which these qualities have hitherto been exercised to the lasting detriment of the Entente nations which looked on and naïvely applauded, that fill the thoughtful student with misgivings about the future. True, it may not be too late for effective counter measures. But two conditions are manifestly essential to the successful application of any remedy: first, that its necessity should be felt and realized; and, second, that the scrupulosity which at present hesitates to apply drastic measures should yield to higher considerations than those of individual delicacy of sentiment and over-refined humanitarianism. When an individual abuses laws and restraints which bind his fellow-men, in order to inflict a deadly injury on them, it is meet that they should free themselves from those checks in their dealings with him. For example, it may be theoretically wrong, after the conclusion of the present struggle, for our people to bear such a grudge against the individual German as would exclude him from communion and intercourse with the nations of the Entente. And this principle would seem to apply with greater force to those Germans who might be willing to abandon their nationality and identify their aims, interests and strivings with those of the nation in which they would fain become incorporated. But when we reflect that almost every German, whatever his calling, how profound soever his debt of gratitude to a foreign people, considers himself first and always a member of his own country, works for its interests to the detriment of all others, and does not scruple to violate moral laws and social traditions in order to betray his new friends, we may well ask in virtue of what precept we should abstain from ostracizing him from the British Empire. His second nationality is so often a mere mask to enable him to perpetrate black treason, and it is so openly thus regarded by his own Government, which upholds and solemnly sanctions the principle, that it would be inexplicable folly on the part of the British nation to aid and abet its enemies by admitting them to the freedom of the community without taking effective precautions against treason.

And yet there is a large body of men in this country, as in France and Italy, who condemn the demand for these precautions as un-Christian and impolitic. Such laxness is the soil in which thrives the upas tree whose shade has so long darkened the organs of our empire and now threatens to blight the whole organism.

An all-important feature in the controversy which has arisen over the naturalization of German subjects is the utterly amoral view of it which underlies the attitude of the Kaiser’s Government. According to these authorities, whose utterances and acts are decisive and final, a German, unlike every other subject, may swear allegiance to two states, of which one is his Fatherland, without being bound by his oath to the other. Various reasons, including material interests, may, it is argued, make it desirable that he should acquire citizenship in a foreign land; and the Kaiser’s Government, for the good of the empire, recognizes this necessity and facilitates the process by a law. This law, which was enacted in July 1913, authorizes the born German subject, having first made known his intention and motive, to swear allegiance to a foreign state without forfeiting, or intending to forfeit, the rights or escaping from the duties which flow from his German citizenship. Now this is a privilege which not even the Pope has ever claimed the faculty of according.

From the point of view of international law this double naturalization is inadmissible. Every individual in the community of nations is the subject of a certain state, and only of one, and whenever the interests of that state run counter to those of any other, he is bound legally as well as morally to promote the former to the best of his ability and means. The Teuton doctrine and practice are that Germans may insinuate themselves into a country, and in the guise of loyal citizens become conversant with its secrets, and then use them to its hurt. In the light of this law, which was a custom long before it became a statute, the number of Germans naturalized in various countries grew amazingly during the past fifteen years. In France, for example, where there were only 38,000 foreigners naturalized in the year 1896 and 65,000 in 1901, the figure reached 90,000 in 1906 and 120,000 five years later. And of these, four-fifths were Germans and Austrians. Many Germans first became Swiss or British subjects in order the more easily to acquire the rights of Frenchmen. One in particular, named Wilhelm Hellpern, first became a Belgian, then as Willy Hellpern a British subject, and finally, with a view to obtaining a place on the Board of the Société Française de l’Industrie Chimique, applied for and received naturalization in France. This “Willy” Hellpern was a representative of the Central Gesellschaft für chemische Industrie.46

When war was declared in 1914 hundreds of Germans applied for papers of naturalization in Switzerland, and obtained them from various little Swiss communes which were in sore want of funds. Spies eager to place their machinations under the protection of Swiss citizenship found smooth ways to the desired goal. In the single canton of Zurich demands for naturalization rose from 260 during the nine months ending in October 1913,47 to 732 in the corresponding nine months of 1915. Several cases of fraud were discovered during this rapid process of transforming foreign into Swiss citizens: one of the most salient being that of Friedrich Wilhelm Frank, a German who had taken out his naturalization papers in England and then decided to shake off his acquired British citizenship for that of the Helvetian Republic. As Frank had not been resident in Switzerland during the two years required by the law of that country he applied and paid for a false certificate of residence, and in this way achieved his object. But the trick was finally discovered and the naturalization cancelled.

We may protest as vigorously as we will against this infamous troth-mongering which is destructive of international relations, and indirectly of social intercourse, but no responsible government can afford to ignore the necessity of guarding against its consequences. For it is no ephemeral manifestation of temperament, nor the passing whim of a political party or a class. The law of double citizenship, coupled with a plenary indulgence for treason and perjury in the cause of the Fatherland, is but the solemn consecration of a principle which was long practised and is warmly approved by the entire German people. The Berlin Government publicly invoked it during the latter half of the year 1915, under circumstances which remove doubts on this score. On one and the same day in August that year all German official and non-official journals published a notice, which ran as follows: “It is alleged that in neutral countries, and particularly in the United States of America, men of German extraction” (the word citizenship is not used, but extraction), “are employed as workmen, engineers or in other capacities in the production of war munitions for our enemies. All those who thus reinforce the military strength of our foes, thereby make the prosecution of the war more difficult for Germany, and not only burden themselves with a heavy load of moral turpitude, but also expose themselves – and many of them are seemingly unaware of this – to the operation of the German laws which punish high treason.”

In other words, subjects of, say the American Republic, who were born there of German parents or grandparents and never acknowledged any other government nor possessed the citizenship of any other country, become guilty of high treason if they dare to avail themselves of the plenitude of the rights which that citizenship confers. They may not work for firms which supply the Allies because their fathers, or it may be only their grandfathers, happened to be Germans. The moral duties of German subjects still lie heavy on them, and they must execute the Kaiser’s will to-day on pain of being dealt with as traitors to the Fatherland.

Monstrous principles and revolting procedure of this kind are calculated to kindle a blaze of indignation in people who realize their effects and set value on the boons of civilization or Christianity. They are among the many new ideas which Kultur has contributed to the stock of weapons destructive of modern society. One might term them the asphyxiating gases of German international politics. In keeping with these teachings and practices were the theft of foreign passports by the German Government which handed them over to spies, as in the case of Lody, who was executed in London in the early part of the war. Thus the binding force of moral and of human law is dissolved whenever it clashes with German national, military, or commercial interests. This dogma lies at the roots of Kultur.

By the time war was declared, Germany had stretched forth her tentacles into various lands and was draining the life-juices of many peoples. Her footing in Italy, Russia, Belgium and France was firm. Observant students of international politics fancied they could determine the approximate date when, if the then rate of progress were maintained, Germany’s overlordship over Europe would be definitely established and all armed conflicts on the Continent become thenceforth meaningless. They were all the more puzzled at what they set down as the egregious folly of jeopardizing the precious fruits of forty years’ well-sustained labours by precipitating a tremendous conflict of doubtful issue. But besides the sudden temptation to utilize a conjuncture of exceptionally favourable promise, the leaders of the Teutonic nations felt moved to appeal to arms by certain slow, but steady, currents which threatened to change the situation to Germany’s detriment in the space of another few years.

With the remoter causes of the Kaiser’s fatal resolve, we are not now concerned. It may suffice to know that they were numerous and that the trend of their operation had been for a few months unmistakable. Time, which was working wonders for the Teuton in one direction, was raising up redoubtable enemies against him in another. For one thing Russia was becoming transfigured. The dry bones of the nation which the Germans often declared was good only as ethnic manure had had life and a soul breathed into them by the great agrarian reform of which the credit belongs to Witte and Stolypin. The latter statesman in a series of conversations had in 1906 opened his mind to me on the subject, and frankly avowed that the Government, having gone astray in its estimate of the Russian peasants who turned out to be revolutionary and anarchistic, was resolved to render them conservative by giving them land and an interest in the maintenance of law and order. That, he informed me, was the aim and origin of the agrarian law, and I expounded the theory, its working and its anticipated consequences, in a series of articles published at the time.48

Down to the year 1861 the Russian serfs had been mostly bound to the soil. They were emancipated by Alexander II., who ordered each landowner to make over to the serfs as much of his landed property as was being actually cultivated by these. Wherever this amount seemed too extensive for the support of a family it was whittled down and the residue left with the landlord. Each of the various lots thus expropriated was given not to an individual, nor to a family, but to the village community. Each field was cut into as many strips as there were farms, and each farm had the use of one. Every year the peasants had to pay a certain sum to the landlord until the land was wholly redeemed, and liability for these payments, like the possession of the land, was common. Hence the drunkards and the lazy paid little or nothing. It was the community which decided when the sowing and when the reaping should take place. The results of this system were baneful. And little by little the more enterprising peasants who had no motive to improve the value of the land which they were allowed for a time to cultivate, migrated to the towns and joined the growing army of working men.

How long this state of things would have continued, if these immediate consequences had formed the only objection to it, is uncertain. But the Revolution of 1905-6 rendered it wholly untenable. The peasantry, on whom the Tsar and the Government counted for support, readily followed the lead of every anarchist and revolutionary who dangled the promise of free land before their eyes, and gutted or burned the manors of the landlords. With no conception of the sacredness, nor, indeed, of the nature of property, they seized what they could by force, and were gravely disappointed when it was re-taken from them by law. Stolypin’s scheme, as he himself propounded it to me, was to enable the peasant to acquire the land he tilled, and not merely the scattered strips, but a compact farm capable of supporting himself and his family. And the system of collective liability for payments to the State was abolished, together with that of collective land-ownership.