68 THE CLASS STRUGGLE SOCIALISTS AND WAR 69 Why the anarchistic tendency of the race has died out in Germany is one of the great mysteries of history. do not myself believe it is dead. think it merely suffering a transitory obscuration or eclipse. believe that deep down in the subconscious depths of the wonderful German nature there still burns the old ineradicable racial ardor for freedom. It is covered deep by the ashes of custom and military discipline, but hope we will not have many years to wait before it will again glow red and warm and burst forth with mighty volcanic power. But it is comparatively easy to see why this love for freedom as an active factor has disappeared from German life.
During all the centuries when free institutions were emerging in England, France and America, and even in Scandinavia, 10 day Germany has remained consistently organized (in Veblen words) on the pattern of the Territorial State a peculiar petty and peculiarly irresponsible autocracy, which has come to its best maturity only among the Germanic peoples. The territorial state is in effect a territorial aggregate, with its population conceived estate belonging in usufruct to a given prince; the concept is visibly of feudal derivation, and the habit of mind which makes it a practicable form of political organization is the feudal habit of personal subservience to a personal master.
In such a polity subordination, personal allegiance, is the prime virtue, the chief condition precedent to its carrying on; while insubordination is the fatal vice, incompatible with such a coercive system.
The people of Germany have had probably over a thousand years of life under this and earlier and probably even more brutally coercive systems, so that they have come to loath insubordination. The spirit of duty in these people, says Veblen, is apparently not nature, in the sense of native proclivity; but it is second nature with the people of the Fatherland, as being the ingrained traditional attitude induced by consistent and protracted experience.
In addition to this we have to reckon in the case of Prussia with 200 years of unremitting military discipline from the days of Friedrich the Great down to the present hour. As Veblen puts it, a military organization in war is a servile organization in peace. It reaches its best efficiency, he adds, only when the habit of arbitrary authority and unquestioning obedience has been so thoroughly ingrained that subservience has become a passionate aspiration with the subject population, where the habit of allegiance has attained that degree of automatism that the subject ideal of liberty has come to be permission to obey orders. Such an ideal growth of patriotic sentiment appears to have been attained, in a tolerable degree of approximation, in the German case.
Boudin has told us why the German army was sure to be used aggressively and piratically. Veblen has shown us that the democratic conception of freedom had for all practical purposes ceased to function within the borders of the Fatherland. Is it any wonder that all thoughtful people stood aghast at the prospect of world domination by a race to whom freedom was an incomprehensible concept? Not only they did not know it in practise; they could not even conceive of its existence or nature.
Surely it is not necessary to tell readers of this magazine of the utterly undemocratic organization of the German Empire. They all must know that the German ministers are responsible not to the Reichstag, but to the Kaiser; that the Reichstag itself is no fair representative of the German people, as it is elected from districts that have not been altered since 1870, when most of the present great German cities were scarcely more than villages; that the Kaiser never or seldom hesitates to dismiss or prorogue the Reichstag when its actions are not subservient; that he can well afford to do this since he depends for what in England would be called his Civil List or in America salary for himself and relatives not on the Reichstag which speaks in the name of the Empire, but upon the Landtag or Diet of Prussia, for these are voted to him in his capacity of King of Prussia; and surely no Socialist is ignorant that under the Prussian three class suffrage the Landtag is owned absolutely by the Prussian Junkers.
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