Читать книгу Imperial Germany & the Industrial Revolution - Thorstein Veblen - Страница 9

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What befel the Germanic peoples through the ages that lie between prehistoric paganism and the late-modern period, whether within their ancient habitat on the Baltic seaboard, or abroad in those seats of conquest and immigration that have since come to be spoken of as the Fatherland, - all that does not concern this inquiry. Just as the particular fortunes of these peoples in prehistoric antiquity have also no interest in this connection, except as the recital may serve to show what is the hereditary racial bent of this population that so lived and thrived under that archaic state of culture. That they did so live and thrive goes to prove that that archaic culture, and the state of the industrial arts in which it was grounded, were suited to their temperamental bent. This hereditary type of human nature, so shown in the working-out of this characteristic culture of pagan antiquity, is of interest in this connection because it is the same human nature with which these peoples today go to their work of getting a living under the conditions offered by the technology of today.

A summary paragraph in the way of a conspectus may therefore be in place. By and large, all these north-European peoples that live within the climatic region of the Baltic-North Sea littoral are of one racial complexion, irrespective of language or nationality. They are all of a composite derivation, a hybrid population made up of some three (or more) racial stocks, with minor contingents thrown in sporadically; the composition of this population varying only by negligible differences from west to east, and varying north and south after a systematic fashion, in respect of the relative proportion in which the several racial constituents enter in the hybrid mixture, - always with the reservation that for the immediate purpose this characterisation need apply only within the climatic region of the Baltic and North Sea. The population of these countries has, therefore, the wide range of individual variability that belongs to a hybrid stock. But even this wide variability, which goes far to give a facile adaptiveness of the people to novel and even to alien conditions, runs after all within certain broad, selectively determined lines, and does not set aside the effectual long-term assertion of a certain, flexible but indefeasible, general drift or generic type of human nature that runs through the whole of these populations, - the tone-giving traits of this type of human nature being those that show themselves in that archaic civilisation which the Baltic peoples worked out during that early period of their racial life-history when they made good their survival. This period of prehistory has been the only phase in the experience of this population that has lasted long enough under passably stable conditions to exert anything like a definitively selective effect, and so to test what they are fit for and what is fit for them. This archaic culture, which so may be said, by selective test, to be congenital to the north-Europeans, will, on its technological side, typi-cally have been of the character of the neolithic, rather than anything else that can be given a specific name; while in point of its domestic, social and civil institutions it may be called a conventionalised anarchy, in the sense that it lacks formal provision for a coercive control, and is drawn on a sufficiently small scale to make it workable by exercise of a tolerant neighborhood surveillance. The like characterisation applies also to the religious cult, and presumptively to the underlying religious conceptions, so far as the available evidence goes. When the polity of this pagan culture finally broke down after many vicissitudes, its place was taken by a predatory organisation that developed into the feudal system among those warlike and piratical migrants that settled in the outlying countries of Europe; while among the population left at home in the Baltic-Scandinavian countries it was presently replaced by a coercive scheme of government of somewhat the same character, constructed in imitation of feudalism.

Particular attention has here been directed to the hybrid derivation of these peoples, and to the fact that the racial composition of this population has not varied in any serious degree since the initial settlement of the Baltic-North Sea littoral in neolithic times; with the possible qualification that the infusion of the brachycephalic-brunet stock into the mixture may have taken effect after the first settlement, although its coming falls also in neolithic times. It results from this state of their racial composition that there is today substantially no hereditary difference between different nationalities within this climatic region, or between the dif-ferent social classes that make up any one of these nationalities.

Their hybrid composition gives also an extremely large facility for the acceptance of novel ideas from outside, together with a wide range of adaptation in all the arts of life, both in technological matters and as regards the scheme of civil and social institutions and the currency of religious and intellectual conceptions. At the same time the same individual variability of the hybrid acts to hinder any given scheme or system of accepted use and wont from attaining a definitive stability; in such a population no system of knowledge, belief, usage, or control can achieve that degree of authenticity and fixity that will make it break rather than bend under the impact of new exigencies that may arise out of technological changes or out of contact with an alien culture; in so much that no scheme of usage and convictions can be devised which will, even with a reasonable margin of tolerance, fall nicely in with the temperamental bent of all, or virtually all, the individuals comprised under it. Therefore, in a population of this character, any comprehensive scheme of use and wont, of knowledge and belief, will in effect necessarily be in some degree provisional; it will necessarily rest on acceptance (in some part concessive acceptance) by a majority of the individuals concerned, rather than on a uniform and unqualified spontaneous consensus of the entire population that lives under its rule. The acceptance accorded such a standard scheme by this effective majority is also necessarily in some appreciable measure an acceptance by consent rather than by free initiative.

That such is the case is evident in any one of the revolutionary changes that have passed over the peoples of Christendom during the historical period; as, e.g., in the growth of feudalism and in the later development of a dynastic state, together with the subsequent shift to a constitutional basis, where that change has been carried out; so also in the gradual acceptance and subsequent growth of the Christian cult and its ecclesiastical dominion, together with the many incidental adventures in religious dissent, and in the variegated outcome of them.

This latter category, the adventures of the religious cult among the north-Europeans, affords perhaps the most felicitous illustration available of the working of such temperamental variability, and of the consequent rise, dominance and decay of successive systems of knowledge and belief. This is, of course, in its own right, a department of the arts of life that is full of polemical asperities and charged with frictional heat. Yet it lies sufficiently aside from the main line of interest involved in the present inquiry to admit of its being drawn on for illustrative material without its engendering heat in the main argument.

In the successful departures in the domain of faith, as well as in those enterprises of devotion that have run a troubled course to an inglorious end, it will be seen that any such novel or aberrant scheme of habits of thought touching the supernatural, uniformly takes its rise as an affection of a certain small number of individuals, who, it may be presumed, have been thrown into a frame of mind propitious to this new fashion of thinking by some line of discipline, physical or spiritual, or rather both, that is not congruous with the previously accepted views on these matters. It will ordinarily be admitted by all but the converts that such pioneers in the domain of the supernatural are exceptional or erratic individuals, specially gifted personalities, perhaps even affected with pathological idiosyncrasies or subject to magical or prćternatural influences; that is to say, in any case, erratic variants of the commonplace racial type, whose aberrant temperamental bent has been reënforced by some peculiar discipline or exceptional experience, and so does not fall in with the currently received habits of thought in these premises. The resulting variant of the cult will then presently find a wider acceptance, in case the discipline exercised by current conditions is such as to bend the habits of thought of some appreciable number of persons with a bias that conforms to this novel drift of religious conceit. And if the new variant of the faith is fortunate enough to coincide passably with the current drift of workday habituation, the band of proselytes will presently multiply into such a formidable popular religious movement as to acquire general credibility and become an authentic formulation of the faith. Quid ab omnibus, quid ubique creditur, credendum est. Many will so come into line with the new religious conceit who could not conceivably have spun the same yarn out of their own wool under any provocation; and the variant may then even come to supplant the parent type of cult from which it first sprang.

If it should be fortunate enough, again, to fit neatly into the scheme of use and wont in secular matters, as that scheme is being shaped by the current exigencies, the new cult may then become the only true faith, and so may become mandatory on all alike; particularly is this likely to happen if at the same time it lends itself to the ends of a ruling class who possess or can find the means of enforcing its observance. This last proposition may also be turned about; if the animus embodied in the new cult is effectually borne up by the discipline of current workday experience at large, persons strongly imbued with the bias of the cult are likely to be thrown up by popular acclaim into responsible offices of discretion, and so come to combine the promptings of their own interest with their pious convictions in its support and bring it to the mature phase of a self-evident and intolerant infallibility.

In the engendering and growth of habitual ideals and convictions touching matters of use and wont at large, or in any given connection, the run of events is not of a character essentially different from the circumstances that surround the inception and spread of these religious verities. The changes that alter the face of national life have small beginnings; the traceable initial process having commonly set in with some overt act on the part of a small and distinctive group of persons, who will then presently be credited with insight and initiative in case the move proves itself by success. Should the movement fail of acceptance and consequent effect, these spokesmen of its propaganda would then prove to have been fanciful project-makers, perhaps of unsound mind.

To describe the course of such a matter by analogy, the symptoms of the new frame of mind will first come in evidence in the attitude of some one individual, who, by congenital proclivity and through an exceptional degree of exposure, is peculiarly liable to its infection. In so far as the like susceptibility is prevalent among the rest of the population, and so far as circumstances of habituation favor the new conceit, it will then presently find lodgment in the habits of thought of an increasing number of persons, - particularly among those whom the excursive play of a hybrid heredity has thrown up as temperamental variants peculiarly apt for its reception, or whom the discipline of life bends with exceptional rigor in the direction of its bias.

Should the new idea also come to have the countenance of those in authority or in a position to claim popular deference, its vogue will be greatly helped out by imitation, and perhaps by compulsory observance, and so it may in a relatively short time become a matter of course and of common sense. But the reservation always stands over, that in such a hybrid population the same prevalent variability of temperament that so favors the infiltration and establishment of new ideas will at the same time render their tenure correspondingly precarious.

The point may be illustrated by the rise and decline of warlike ideals from time to time among modern nations; though it is the rise and rule of these ideals, rather than their decline, that will best illustrate the point. The decline of such ideals, and of the patriotic animosity in which they find outward expression, would appear to be a matter of reversion through neglect rather than of aggressive indoctrination through propaganda and suitable discipline. The cause of peace and amity appears not to be served by polemical propaganda, any more than by a strenuous warlike preparation for “keeping the peace.”

There is always an appreciable warlike animus present in these modern nations; necessarily so, since their governmental establishments are necessarily of a coercive character and their ruling classes are animated with dynastic ambitions. In this matter the republican states uncritically imitate the dynastic ones so effectually as to make no grave exception from the rule. The historical tradition and precedents run that way. So that the ferment is always at hand. But in the absence of special provocation the commonplace body of the population, being occupied with other interests and having no natural bent for fighting in order to fight, will by easy neglect drift into peaceable habits of thought, and so come habitually to think of human relations, even of international relations, in terms of peace, if not of amity.

Temperamentally erratic individuals, however, and such as are schooled by special class traditions or predisposed by special class interest, will readily see the merits of warlike enterprise and keep alive the tradition of national animosity. Patriotism, piracy and prerogative converge to a common issue. Where it happens that an individual gifted with an extravagant congenital bias of this character is at the same time exposed to circumstances favoring the development of a truculent megalomania and is placed in such a position of irresponsible authority and authentic prerogative as will lend countenance to his idiosyncrasies, his bent may easily gather vogue, become fashionable, and with due persistence and shrewd management come so ubiquitously into habitual acceptance as in effect to throw the population at large into an enthusiastically bellicose frame of mind. Such is particularly apt to be the consequence in case of a people whose historical traditions run in terms of dynastic strategy and whose workday scheme of institutions is drawn on lines of coercion, prerogative and loyalty.

It is only with the new departure of 1870 that Germany has come to take its place in the general apprehension as a singularly striking, not to say unique, instance of exuberant growth. The history of its unfolding power, of course, is not contained in this brief interval that lies within the memory of men still living; but the new departure by force of which the life-history of the German nation has come to diverge so notably from the commonplace run of events in modern Europe can after all not be pushed back far beyond that epoch. Anyone who seeks a precise period from which to date this epoch of German history will have difficulty in deciding on any given point earlier than the year named. And what had taken place in the way of an unfolding of national forces before that date is of great significance only for its bearing on what has taken place since then.

The visible achievements of the German people during this historical period, so far as they are amenable to statistical statement, are a gain in population, in industrial efficiency, and in military force. Other gains are claimed, perhaps even of greater moment in the apprehension of the spokesmen, and there is no inclination here to discount or minimise their achievements outside of this material domain; but the magnitude of the advance in these other lines is in some degree a matter of estimate and opinion, which may in that degree be influenced by sentiments of self-complacency or of depreciation, whereas the gains in the material respect spoken for above are beyond cavil. But judged by these physically measurable marks of excellence, the historical period within which this modern onset of the German people runs will have to be dated somewhat back of the French-Prussian war. In each of the three respects named the advance was well under way before that date. It is, however, safe to say that this beginning of the current era falls within the second quarter of the nineteenth century.¹⁶ It is also safe to say that the prime mover among these factors of the nation’s unfolding power has been its increased industrial efficiency, rather than either of the other two. While their increasing efficiency has doubtless been conditioned by the growth in population, the initiative, as between these two, has doubtless vested in the former rather than in the latter. In the correlation between industrial advance and population the primacy belongs to the former. The like is true, of course, as regards the growth in military strength.

Also, doubtless, a large place among the causes of growth and efficiency is believed to be due to a wise governmental policy and a shrewd administration, but opinion counts for much in the appraisal of this governmental policy, and opinion on such a matter is liable to partiality, for or against. The unfolding of warlike power has unequivocally been a work of governmental policy, and the same policy has unquestionably sought to further the industrial advance; the question that presents itself in the latter connection is not as to the faithful intentions and endeavor of the government - or “State,” to use the German concept - but only as to the probable degree of efficacy of these good intentions and endeavor; and on this head opinions will not coincide, and the proposition will therefore best be left out of the premises.

As is well known, the practical movement for German union, which came to a successful issue in the eventual formation of the Empire, owed its beginnings and its earlier success to the economic needs of the German countries, - or it may be said to have been provoked by the grievous burden of artificial evils created by the governments of the small states among which the country was divided. So, as a practical measure, it begins with the formation of a Tariff Union, designed to remove certain of the obstacles which the particularist policies of these states had erected. And this union and uniformity of economic policy within the Empire is still one of the chief assets of its strength, particularly the absence of internal tariff restrictions.

The place and relation of Germany to the industrial development of modern Europe, therefore, will necessarily be the point of departure for any inquiry into the fortunes and achievements of the German people in this modern era. On this head, then, its natural resources available for modern industrial use are of the same kind and range as those found in the neighboring countries; there is substantially nothing to distinguish the German lands from those of north Europe at large, unless it be that the resources of the country are slightly under grade in quality and slightly scant in quantity, at least as compared with the most fortunate of the neighboring countries. Again, in point of native proclivity and aptitude the German population is virtually identical with its neighbors. In respect of hereditary endowment - racial character - it is the same people as the population of the neighboring nations, - more particularly identical with the Dutch, Belgian and British. By virtue of its hybrid extraction it is, like these others, gifted with a large capacity for acquiring and turning to account a wide range of technological knowledge; and by virtue of the same hereditary bias of workmanship that animates these others it is, like its neighbors, assiduously and sagaciously addicted to industry and thrift. What chiefly distinguishes the German people from these others in this connection, and more particularly from the British, is that the Germans are new to this industrial system; and the distinctive traits of the German case are in the main traceable to this fact that they are still in their novitiate.

When the current era in the life-history of the German people began, in the second quarter of the nineteenth century, Germany was far in arrears, as compared with its neighbors to the west, but more particularly as contrasted with the British. This is historical commonplace, of course. It may be taken with such allowance and qualification as may seem needful; the main fact remains, that in certain decisive, or at least substantial, respects Germany was in an anachronistic state, particularly as seen from the station occupied by the English-speaking peoples.

There is no call to depreciate the merits of the German culture of that time in those respects in which it excelled, as there would also be no use in attempting an undervaluation of it; it is too large a fact in the heritage of mankind to suffer seriously from an assault of words. However, those genial respects in which the civilisation characteristic of Germany excelled, - in which, indeed, Germany triumphed, - were not in the line of efficiency that counted materially toward fitness for life under the scheme of things then taking shape in Europe. It may have been better or it may have been worse than what came to take its place, but in any case it was not an articulate part of the working scheme; as is proven in the sequel, which was worked out with only negligible contributions from the accumulated wisdom of the German people.

Germany was in arrears in the industrial arts and in its political institutions, as well as in such features of its civil and domestic scheme of life as come intimately into correlation with, or under the dominant influence of, these fundamental agencies in the scheme of institutions. This is the visible difference between the case of the German and of the British peoples at the time, apart from superficial peculiarities of usage and the idly decorative elements of culture. In industrial matters Germany was still at the handicraft stage, with all that is implied in that description in the way of institutional impedimenta and meticulous standardisation of trifles. Measured by the rate of progression that had brought the English community to the point where it then stood, the German industrial system was some two and a half or three centuries in arrears - somewhere in Elizabethan times; its political system was even more archaic; and use and wont governing social relations in detail was of a character such as this economic and political situation would necessarily foster.

The characterisation so offered applies to the industrial organisation as a balanced and comprehensive working system. It does not overlook the fact that many alien details had been intruded into this archaic system by force of Germany’s unavoidable contact with the more modern industrial communities of western Europe. But it was not until the second half of the nineteenth century that the alien elements seriously began to derange the framework of the archaic scheme.

Politically much the same will hold, except that fewer modernisms had found their way over the frontiers in this domain, nor had such modernisms effected an equally secure and disturbing lodgment in the tissues of the body politic, Germany being still consistently organised on the pattern of the “territorial State,” - a peculiarly petty and peculiarly irresponsible autocracy, which has come to its best maturity only among the Germanic peoples, and which has held its place with remarkable tenacity within the limits of the Fatherland.

The territorial State, or its less finished replica under another designation, has not been unknown elsewhere in the north-European country, but it passed out by obsolescence some time ago among the other north-European peoples; so that even the Scandinavian countries, which would appear by geographical necessity to have been designed for petty things, had lost this archaic fashion of state policy and political control by the time when the question of its supersession began to attract an (ineffectual) speculative interest in Germany. The territorial State is in effect a territorial aggregate, with its population, conceived as an 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 organisation 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.

As seen from the standpoint of the political interests in such a State, the spirit of abnegation is by apologetic euphemism spoken of as “duty,” while insubordination is called “contumacy.” The former is the habit of mind engendered by continued and consistent suppression, and is the basis of a servile political organisation, such as the territorial State; the latter, if allowed a free course will eventuate in an anarchistic autonomy, such as appears to have been the constitution of Germanic society in the prehistoric ages before the barbarian invasions established a coercive rule in what is now the Fatherland. The latter appears to coincide with the natural bent of these peoples; but the former has that secure hold on their spirit that results from fifteen centuries of submission to a masterful discipline of coercion. The spirit of “duty” in these people 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 speaking of these things in the terms current among modern civilised men it is nearly impossible to avoid the appearance of deprecating this servile or submissive attitude of “duty”; particularly will this difficulty beset anyone using the English language, - the fringe of derogatory suggestion carried by the available words and phrases is appreciably less embarrassing, e.g., in German, although even there the commonplace vocabulary lends itself with greater facility to the dispraise of servility and irresponsible rule than to the commendation of these elements of modern patriotism. That such should be the case is doubtless due to the drift of institutional development in western Europe in modern times, which has on the whole set somewhat consistently in the direction of a gradual loosening of the grip of dynastic autocracy. This drift has perhaps not so much created or initiated the growth of an anarchistic (that is to say, non-servile) spirit, but rather has permissively harbored it, and so has allowed the native anarchistic bent of these peoples to reassert itself in a measure, by force of the indefeasible resiliency that characterises all hereditary proclivities.¹⁷

Any, even a very cursory, scrutiny of the historical growth of free, or popular, institutions in modern Europe should satisfy all parties in interest that this growth has come about, not because the authorities vested with discretion and power have not taken thought to defeat it wherever a chance has offered, but because the conditioning circumstances have not enabled them to discourage it sufficiently. And by virtue of the close and facile communication of ideas among modern peoples the anarchistic penchant has, by channels of education and neighborly intercourse, come to infect even the subject populations of the better preserved territorial States; so that even there, under the shadow of the masterful system, the current vocabulary shows a weakness for free institutions and the masterless man.

While the exigencies of the language, therefore, almost unavoidably give a color of deprecation to any discussion of this surviving habit of abnegation in the people of the Fatherland, there is no intention here to praise or to blame this spirit of subordination that underlies so much of German culture and German achievement. It is one of the larger factors that have gone to the creation of the modern era in that country, and this era and its “system” will have to count with whatever strength or weakness this animus of feudalism contributes to the outcome. Now, it happens that this surviving feudalistic animus of fealty and subservience has visibly been a source of strength to the German State hitherto; as it presumably also has to the economic system, apart from the political ends to be served by the community’s economic efficiency. This is to be recognised and taken account of quite apart from any question as to the ultimate merits of such a popular temper in any other connection, or even as to its ulterior value for the ends of the State. For all that concerns the present inquiry it may or may not appear, as doubtless would appear to the mind of most English-speaking persons, that this spirit of subservient alacrity on which the Prussian system of administrative efficiency rests is beneath the human dignity of a free man; that it is the spirit of a subject, not of a citizen; that except for dynastic uses it is a defect and a delinquency; and that in the end the exigencies of civilised life will not tolerate such an anachronistic remnant of medićvalism, and the habit of it will be lost. For all that can be made to appear today, it may also be true that it has only a transient value even for the uses of the dynastic State; but all that does not derange the fact that hitherto it has visibly been a source of strength to the German State, and presumably to the German people at large as an economic body.

In the second quarter of the nineteenth century there began a complex movement of readjustment and rehabilitation in German affairs. At least on its face this movement is primarily of an economic character, the immediate provo-cation to practical activity being the needs of trade and of the princely exchequers.

Much genial speculation, of an academic kind, and much edifying popular exposition and agitation of national ideals ran along beside these practical measures, and this intellectual and spiritual disturbance may have had more or less to do with the measures taken and with the general drift of national policy. It is not easy to say whether this spiritual disturbance is to be rated as a cause or a concomitant of the practical changes going forward during this period, but it should seem reasonable to give it place on both of these grounds.

The fashion among historians of the period, particularly among patriotic historians, has been to construe this complex movement of forces, material and immaterial, that makes German history through the middle half of the century, as a movement of the German spirit, initiated by the exuberant national genius of the race. Such is the tradition, but the tradition comes out of the Romantic era; out of which no tradition of a more matter-of-fact character could conceivably come.

A matter-of-fact view of such an historical movement will necessarily look to the factors which may have had a part in shaping habits of thought at the time, and here there are only two lines of derivation to which the analysis can securely run back, - discounting, as is the current fashion, any occult agencies, such as manifest destiny, national genius, Providential guidance, and the like. There is no call to undervalue these occult agencies, of course; but granting that these and their like are the hidden springs, it is also to be called to mind that it is their nature to remain hidden, and that the tangible agencies through which these presumed hidden prime movers work must therefore be sufficient for the work without recourse to the hidden springs; which can have an effect only by force of a magical efficacy. Their relation to the course of events is of the nature of occult or magical efficacy, not of causal efficiency; and under the modern materialistic prejudice in these matters of scientific inquiry, the causal sequence in which an explanation of events is sought must be complete in all elements that touch the motivation and the outcome, without drawing on any but tangible fact, on matters that are of the nature of “data.” To the modern preconception in favor of efficient cause, as contrasted with the Romantic postulate of efficacious guidance, any attempt to set up a logical finality in any terms other than matter-of-fact is quite nugatory. It may be a genial work of futility, and it may have its value as dramatic art or homiletical discourse; but in the house of scientific inquiry such premises, and generalisations in such terms, are but as sounding brass and a tinkling cymbal.

There are two lines of agency visibly at work shaping the habits of thought of the people in the complex movement of readjustment and rehabilitation spoken of above. These are the received scheme of use and wont, and the new state of the industrial arts; and it is not difficult to see that it is the latter that makes for readjustment; nor should it be any more difficult to see that the readjustment is necessarily made under the surveillance of the received scheme of use and wont. The latter is modified in the course of this new range of habituation enforced by the new state of the industrial arts, but the changes taking place in use and wont are, here as elsewhere, made in the way of tardy concession under the impact of exigencies that will tangibly not tolerate usage that has passed out of date.

The complex movement in question is a movement of readjustment in the arts of life to meet the requirements of new technological conditions, and of rehabilitation of the received scheme of princely policy to make it workable under the new technological conditions. The changes which appear in the outcome, therefore, come about on the initiative of the new technological advance, and by expedient concessions and shrewd endeavors on the part of the constituted authority to turn the new-won efficiency to use for its own ends; the conscious directive management in the case being under the hands of the governmental organisation and directed to such a rehabilitation of the territorial State as would enable it to do business on the increased scale imposed by the new state of the industrial arts, and adequately to handle the forces which the new industrial system so placed at its disposal.

Much had already been done during the preceding hundred years to take advantage of technological improvements, so far as these improvements contributed directly to the military strength of the prince, and much had been done, incidentally to the extension of territorial control and of fiscal administration, in the way of improved means of communication and intercourse; but the modern industrial system, as such, and except as an outside and essentially alien factor, had not seriously touched the German popu-lation, particularly not those Prussian dominions which take the central place in the rehabilitation of Germany in the nineteenth century. But the industrial state of Germany was after all medićval rather than modern, and the state of the industrial arts, therefore, still continued, on the whole, favorable to the maintenance of the old régime; particularly since this old régime was securely lodged in the interests and traditional ideals of the dynastic rulers and of the privileged classes.

There is a side line of influence from the technological side in the growth of German culture prior to its modernisation, which requires to be noted in any attempt to realise what has taken place in the unfolding of the modern era. The art of printing and the consequent use of printed matter had always been at home among the German people, ever since that technological advance first was made.

From the outset and down into the nineteenth century the printer’s art was a handicraft process, and was well developed in Germany. But the institutional consequences, the effect on use and wont, of the habit of consuming printed matter need not therefore be of the handicraft order. A free consumption of printed matter means a free intercourse of ideas, and it therefore entails an exposure of the consumers to contact with ideas current beyond the circle of their immediate personal contact.

The habitual consumption of print has much the same order of disciplinary effect as habituation to the wide-reaching standardisation of the arts of life brought on by the machine industry; but it goes without saying that the effect so wrought by the use of print will not extend much beyond the class of persons addicted to it; the illiterate, and the classes who make little use of print anyway, will not be seriously or extensively disturbed, - what may be called the extravasation of printed literature is not a matter of large consequence, although it is not to be denied that the diffusion of ideas conveyed by print, among the illiterate, will always amount to something. Whereas the disciplinary value of life under the standardising régime of the machine industry touches the illiterate perhaps more immediately and intimately, and almost as comprehensively, as it touches the classes who habitually read.

It is worth noting in this immediate connection, although it is also a proposition of general validity, that in the nature of the case no profound or massive revolutionary disturbance of the established order, in any respect, can be carried through by the medium of printed matter alone, or in the absence of other, materially more exacting and peremptory, factors of habituation working to the same general effect. So in the case of Germany, although that fraction of the population that was given to reading had long been in contact with the intellectual movement in Europe at large and had, indeed, from time to time, taken effective part in the shaping of current ideas, yet this fraction made up so small a class, was so little in touch with the mass of the population, and held its intellectual convictions on such “academic” tenure - that is to say, so uniformly without reënforcement from its own experience of mechanical fact - that with the best intentions it never succeeded in infecting the people at large with its own ideals of a new order, or in disturbing the incumbents of office in their tenure and usufruct of the old order.¹⁸ At the same time printed matter is a highly efficient vehicle for the spread, assimilation and standardisation of habits of thought that are otherwise consonant with the workday exigencies of the arts of life; and then, too, the habit of reading is a nearly indispensable auxiliary of that machine technology that invaded the German community in the nineteenth century, - less so, of course, at that date (middle of the century) than at any later time, but sufficiently so even then to count seriously in the outcome.¹⁹ Now, literacy, both in the higher potency of “learning” and in the homelier fashion of ability fluently to read print, was relatively common among the German people at the time when the new era came on; and the movement for improving and extending the means of popular education was already in good practicable shape, so that deficiencies in this respect could be made good as fast as they visibly required a remedy. It used to be one of the stock aspersions on the German community that it was top-heavy with a redundance of learned men. Fault-finding on this score has ceased since the latter part of the century, the learned class having been found useful and the demand for men proficient in the sciences having fully caught up. Meantime the character of this learning, or rather the direction of it, has changed somewhat, the change resulting on the whole in a pronounced shift toward those branches of knowledge that have some technological or commercial value.²⁰

As regards the logical relation between the modern industrial advance and the modernised dynastic State in Germany, it may be held that the makers of this State, the policy of the Hohenzollern dynasty from Frederick the Great to William II, have made use of all available technological improvements to extend the dominion and improve the efficiency of the State; or it may be held, on the other hand, that the technological advance which enforced a larger scale of industry and trade, as well as a larger and more expensive equipment and strategy in the art of war, also drove the dynastic State to reorganisation on a new and enlarged plan, involving an increased differentiation of the administrative machinery and a more detailed and exacting control of the sources of revenue.

Either view appears to be equally true. German students of the case have commonly adopted the former, somewhat to the neglect of what force there is in the latter view. It should be evident that the minuscular territorial State of the high tide of German particularism, with its crepuscular statesmanship, would have no chance of survival under the conditions prevailing in Europe in the nineteenth century. It is equally evident that those dynastic statesmen within this circle of particularism who, either by force of insight or by force of special exigencies and tentative expedients, were led to take advantage of the larger and mechanically more efficient devices of the new age would enjoy a differential advantage as against their conservative neighbors, and would in the end supplant them in the domain of statecraft and presently take over their substance, - the dynastic State being necessarily of a competitive, or rapacious, character, and free to use any expedient that comes to hand. It is a case of selective survival working out through the competitive manoeuvres of those who had the administration of the one and the other policy in hand.

When the state of the industrial arts had so extended the physical reach of civil administration and political strategy as definitively to make a large-scale national organisation practicable, the old order of self-sufficient petty principalities became impossible. This change reached the German territories at a later date than the rest of western Europe, and it did not take effect in a reorganisation of national life until so late a date that the retardation is a matter of surprise in spite of all the explanations offered by the historians.

But in consequence of this retardation the magnitude of the reorganisation, when it came, was also such as to leave the historians somewhat at a loss to account for it without recourse to race characteristics imputed ad hoc as well as to the magical effects of a nepotic predilection on the part of Providence.

By wise management on the part of the dynastic statesmen who have had the direction of policy and the control of the administrative machinery, the rapidly increasing material efficiency of the German community, due to the introduction of the modern state of the industrial arts, has successfully been turned to the use of the State, in a degree not approached elsewhere in western Europe; so that in effect the community stands to the Hohenzollern State somewhat in the relation of a dynastic estate, a quasi-manorial demesne or domain, to be administered for dynastic ends, very much after the fashion of the cameralistic administration of fiscal affairs in the territorial states of Germany a hundred years ago. This subservience of the community to dynastic ends and dynastic management has been secured in the gross by a policy of warlike aggression, and in detail by a system of bureaucratic surveillance and unremitting interference in the private life of subjects.

It goes without saying that there is no secure ground for such a scheme of dynastic usufruct and control except in the loyal support of popular sentiment; and it likewise goes without saying that such a state of popular sentiment can be maintained only by unremitting habituation, discipline sagaciously and relentlessly directed to this end. More particularly must the course of habituation to this end be persistent and unwavering if it is to hold the personal allegiance of a body of subjects exposed to the disintegrating discipline of modern life; where the machine industry constantly enforces the futility of personal force and prerogative in the face of wide-sweeping inanimate agencies and mechanical process, and where the ubiquitous haggling of the price system constantly teaches that every man is his own keeper. It is a matter of common notoriety that all this has been taken care of with unexampled thoroughness and effect under the Prussian rule.²¹ Chief of the agencies that have kept the submissive allegiance of the German people to the State intact is, of course, successful warfare, seconded by the disciplinary effects of warlike preparation and indoctrination with warlike arrogance and ambitions. The attention deliberately given to these concerns is also a fact of common notoriety; so much so, indeed, that the spokesmen of the system have come to take it for granted as a matter of course, and so are apt to overlook it. The experience of war induces a warlike frame of mind; and the pursuit of war, being an exercise in the following of one’s leader and execution of arbitrary orders, induces an animus of enthusiastic subservience and unquestioning obedience to authority. What is a military organisa-tion in war is a servile organisation in peace. The system is the same, and the popular animus requisite to its successful working is the same in either case. It reaches its best efficiency in either case, in war or peace, 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’s ideal of liberty has come to be permission to obey orders, - somewhat after the fashion in which theologians interpret the freedom of the faithful, whose supreme privilege it is to fulfil all the divine commands. Such an ideal growth of patriotic sentiment appears to have been attained, in a tolerable degree of approximation, in the German case, if one is to credit the popular encomiasts, who explain that “duty,” in the sense indicated, combined with “freedom,” makes up the goal to which the German spirit aspires. “Duty,” of course, comprises the exercise of arbitrary command on the part of the superior as well as the obedience of the inferior, but such arbitrary authority is exercised only in due submission to higher authority, until it traces back to the dynastic head, - who, it would appear, in turn exercises only a delegated authority, vested in his person by divine grace.

The phrase, “dynastic State,” is here used in preference to “patrimonial State,” not because there is any substantial difference between the two conceptions, but rather because the later German spokesmen for the German State, as it is seen at work during the Imperial era, appear to have an aversion to the latter term, which they wish to apply to the territorial State of the pre-Imperial time, in contradistinction to the State as rehabilitated in the adoption of a constitution comprising a modicum of representative institutions and parliamentary forms. The designation “dynastic” is still applicable, however; and in effect the constitutional rehabilitation has not taken the German State out of the category of patrimonial monarchies. The difference resulting from the Imperial constitution is in large part a difference in form and in administrative machinery; it does not greatly circumscribe the effectual powers, rights and discretion of the Imperial crown; still less does it seriously limit the powers of the Prussian crown, or the dynastic claims of suzerainty vested in the Prussian succession. Even under the constitution it is a government resting on the suzerainty of the crown, not on the discretion of a parliamentary body.

It is, in other words, a government of constitutionally mitigated absolutism, not of parliamentary discretion tempered with monarchy.

In the shift from particularism to the Empire no revolutionary move was made, comparable with the change initiated in the United Kingdom by the revolution of 1688; if such a shift to a democratic constitution is to overtake the German State, that move lies still in the future. The changes introduced with the constitution of the Empire, in so far as they have been effectual, were such as were made necessary by the larger scale on which the new national jurisdiction was required to work, and involved only such a modicum of delegated jurisdiction to parliamentary and local organisations as would be expedient for the control and usufruct of territory and resources, population, trade and industry, that exceed the effectual reach of the simpler bureaucracy characteristic of the small territorial State. The economic policy of the Imperial era has still continued to be a “cameralistic” policy, with such concessive adaptations as the modern scale and complexity of economic affairs necessitate. It is true, under the administration of Bismarck there was a perceptible drift in the direction of those “liberal” preconceptions that subconsciously biassed the endeavors of all European statesmen through much of the latter half of the century; but this drift, which showed itself in the Bismarckian policies of trade, colonies, and incipient ministerial responsibility, never came to anything conclusive under his hands; nor had it gone so far as in any appreciable degree to embarrass the endeavors of the later emperor, directed to the complete revendication of the Imperial suzerainty. The paramount authority, under the Imperial constitution, vests in the crown, not in any representative body, although this holds with even less qualification in the Prussian than in the Imperial government; but Germany has, in these respects, been progressively “Prussianised” during the Imperial era, while Prussia has not been drawing toward the lines of that democratic autonomy that holds the rest of north and central Europe, at least on a qualified and provisional tenure.

Imperial Germany does not depart sensibly from the pattern of Prussia under Frederick the Great, in respect of its national policies or the aims and methods of government control, nor do the preconceptions of its statesmen differ at all widely from those prevalent among the dynastic jobbers of that predaceous era of state-making. The difference touches mainly the machinery of politics and administration, and it is mainly of such a character as is dictated by an endeavor to turn the results of modern industry and commerce to account for the purposes that once seemed good to the pragmatists of that earlier era.

That such is the case need give no occasion for dispraise. At least there is nothing of the kind implied here. It may be an untoward state of things, perhaps, though sufficient proof of such a contention has not yet come in sight.

It is specifically called to mind here because it is one of the main factors in the case of Imperial Germany considered as a phase of the development of institutions within the Western culture.

This modern state of the industrial arts that so has led to the rehabilitation of a dynastic State in Germany on a scale exceeding what had been practicable in earlier times, - this technological advance was not made in Germany but was borrowed, directly or at the second remove, from the English-speaking peoples; primarily, and in the last resort almost wholly, from England. What has been insisted on above is that British use and wont in other than the technological respect was not taken over by the German community at the same time. The result being that Germany offers what is by contrast with England an anomaly, in that it shows the working of the modern state of the industrial arts as worked out by the English, but without the characteristic range of institutions and convictions that have grown up among English-speaking peoples concomitantly with the growth of this modern state of the industrial arts.

Germany combines the results of English experience in the development of modern technology with a state of the other arts of life more nearly equivalent to what prevailed in England before the modern industrial régime came on; so that the German people have been enabled to take up the technological heritage of the English without having paid for it in the habits of thought, the use and wont, induced in the English community by the experience involved in achieving it. Modern technology has come to the Germans ready-made, without the cultural consequences which its gradual development and continued use has entailed among the people whose experience initiated it and determined the course of its development.

The position of the Germans is not precisely unique in this respect; in a degree the same general proposition will apply to the other Western nations,²² but it applies to none with anything like the same breadth. The case of Germany is unexampled among Western nations both as regards the abruptness, thoroughness and amplitude of its appropriation of this technology, and as regards the archaism of its cultural furniture at the date of this appropriation.

It will be in place to call to mind, in this connection, what has been said in an earlier chapter on the advantage of borrowing the technological arts rather than developing them by home growth. In the transit from one community to another the technological elements so borrowed do not carry over the fringe of other cultural elements that have grown up about them in the course of their development and use. The new expedients come to hand stripped of whatever has only a putative or conventional bearing on their use. On the lower levels of culture this fringe of conventional or putative exactions bound up with the usufruct of given technological devices would be mainly of the nature of magical or religious observances; but on the higher levels, in cases of the class here in question, they are more likely to be conventionalities embedded in custom and to some extent in law, of a secular kind, but frequently approaching the mandatory character of religious observances, as, e.g., the requirement of a decently expensive standard of living.