88 THE CLASS STRUGGLE SOCIALISTS AND WAR 89 ten thousand years ago are considered determinant to dayin a world revolutioniezd by steam and electricity, and knit together by the wireless and international trade in all the seven corners of the earth!
The characteristics of the race, the fundamental ones, survive, and among them are the instinct to happiness and the spirit of adaptation. Based upon these two human factors, the race may completely revolutionize itself and its enviornment. The fundamental characteristics of races are identical, only their expressions vary.
The essential institutions of the Baltic peoples prevailed among the peoples of the Mediterranean at the same stage of civilization. The spirit of insubordination was universal. And if the spirit of subordination is greater in Germany, it is not because of any pecularity in its people, but because of its social development. In passing, why does La Monte in his dithyrambic passage about Magna Charta, Valley Forge, the Bastile and the Battle of the Marne, omit any mention of the Reformation? The reformation of Luther struck the first great blow for the freedom of modern Europe. It was an event second only to the French Revolution, and it is a contribution measurable with that of Great Britain and France to modern history and civilization. Could a race to whom freedom was an incomprehensible concept achieve the Reformation?
The circumstance of Germany being organized on the basis of the territorial state proves nothing against Germany, or for La Monte thesis. Every great nation of Europe has at periods in its history been organized on the basis of the territorial state.
The territorial state is an incident in the onward and upward development of the nation, dominant at the period when the nation is consummating its unity and carving out its frontiers.
If Germany had its Frederick the Great, France had its Louis XIV.
The perpetuation of the territorial state and of autocracy in Germany is not due to racial characteristics, but to the conditions of modern Imperialism.
Verblen, in Imperial Germany, points out that the introduction in Germany of the modern technology of capitalism did not overthrow the old political order because this technology was introduced from without, borrowed, to use Veblen phrase, and was not developed from within. The development of this technology in other countries produced great social and political changes, it had to fight its way against the institutions of the old order and overthrow those institutions; whereas in Germany it was assimilated, which produced the phenomenon of a mighty and efficient capitalism without its corresponding political superstructure.
There is a great deal of truth in Veblen analysis, but it is not the fundamental truth. In spite of the fact that the modern technology had its general beginnings in the Italy of the fourteenth century, these beginnings died out, and the modern technology in Italy was equally largely assimilated. This, however, did not produce a powerful autocratic stace. In the case of Germany it did, because its liberal middle class, in fear of the proletariat, compromised with and accepted autocracy temporarily; then Bismarckian autocracy emerged into Imperialistic autocracy, and the German bourgeois accepted autocracy permanently.
Veblen believes, and imagine that La Monte concurs in this belief, that autocracy prevails in Germany because of its own power, and dominates as an autocracy. It does not. Autocracy prevails in Germany to day because Imperialistic capitalism has found it necessary and efficacious in the accomplishment of its aggressive purposes. The autocracy would not exist a day if it had not compromised with Imperialism and expressed the interests of Imperialism. It is precisely this Imperialism that makes German autocracy dangerous; and it is precisely this circumstance that largely produced the Russian Revolution, because the autocracy of the Czar did not express the interests of the nascent Imperialistic bourgeoisie. But in Russia to day, there is a great danger that a compromise may be struck by the Imperialistic bourgeoisie and the autocracy, in order to secure power for pursuing projects of conquest and subduing the democracy of the proletariat a compromise already secretly at