University of Virginia Library

GERMANY AND NEUTRAL STATES.[1]

NO hatred is so bitter as enmity against the man
who has been unjustly treated; men hate in
him what they have done to him. That is as true
of nations as of individuals. All our neighbours,
some time or other, grew at Germany's expense,
and to-day, when we have at length smashed the
last remnants of foreign domination, and demand
a modest reward for righteous victories, a permanent
guarantee of national freedom, angry
blame of German insatiability resounds throughout
the European press. Especially do those small
countries, which owe their very existence to the
dismemberment of the German Empire, e. g.,
Belgium, Holland, Switzerland, complain loudly
that an arrogant Pan-Germanism has destroyed
our people's sense of fairness. It is hatred that
vents itself in these charges; no impartial person
can deny that the notion of Pan-Germanism is as
foreign to us Germans as its name, which originated
in the bogey-fears of foreign countries. No doubt
owing to the excitement of the times, a foolish

boastfulness has here and there come into being;
out-and-out Teutons are imploring us to banish
all foreign words from the sanctuary of the German
language; men of picturesque talents among
the unemployed are drawing on the patient map
of Europe a kingdom of Armorica and Arelat
between France and Germany. However, such
ideas are simply the isolated absurdities of idle
heads; once in a while they may accidentally
stray into one of the bigger newspapers, but even
then they appear only in those insignificant columns
devoted to such subjects as sea-snakes and
triplets, children with fowls' heads,and the mythical
Fusilier Kutschke. The great majority of
German politicians exhibit to-day a deliberate
moderation, which the Swiss and Belgians would
hold in greater respect if those nations, which
enjoy the more comfortable peace and quiet of a
neutrality protected by other Powers, were able
to put themselves in thought in the position of a
great warrior-nation which has been forced to
fight for its life by an unscrupulous attack.

Public opinion has become more quickly united
regarding the reward of our victory than ever
before in a complicated question. The boundary
line of the Government of Alsace, which has indeed
been drawn with a considerate hand and will presumably
constitute Germany's boundary, meets
almost everywhere with agreement. People only
regret, and rightly so, that the splendid region of
the Breusch, which is abundant in springs, and

the district around Schirmack, together with the
Steinthal, that essentially German tract of country
consecrated by the life-work of the unforgettable
Oberlin, are not included in the new boundary.
Blind lust of conquest is so alien to the Germans
that they even decide with much unwillingness
to demand the possession of Metz; but the obvious
impossibility of leaving right at our doors in the
hands of revengeful enemies this town, which is a
stronghold by its position, not by its walls, compels
us in this case to enter into occupation of French
territory.

The desire of robbing the neutral neighbouring
States, which imaginative persons in Bâle and
Brussels are fond of attributing to us, is expressed
only by some isolated German Chauvinists. We
notice with anxiety, like all the thoughtful Swiss,
that those two decades of fresh prosperity which
Switzerland enjoyed since the Civil War are to-day
at an end. We ask, gravely, what shall eventually
be the outcome of a development which is tending
ever more and more to loosen every community
and every individual from the State? But we
honestly wish that the Confederation may succeed
in overcoming the disintegrating power of an
unbridled Radicalism; the rôle which this asylum
for all parties has long played, to the good of Europe,
is not yet played out by any means. No intelligent
German wants to increase the excessively
strong centrifugal powers, which are embraced
in our new Empire, by the inclusion of purely

Republican elements, and all free men are horror-struck
at the thought that Geneva and Lausanne,
which are to-day the centres of an independent
intellectual movement, would, by the dissolution
of the Swiss Confederation, be involved in the
horrible fall of France. We are also quite without
arrière-pensée in regard to the Netherland States,
which did so little to win Germany's friendship;
we certainly trust that the strengthening of the
German Empire will of itself bring it about, that
the foolish inclination at The Hague to France may
be moderated, and that the Flemish majority in
Belgium may find the courage to assert their race
beside the Walloon minority. Still, because we
do not want to shake the national constitutions
of these buffer-States, because we demand a
lasting arrangement on our Western boundary,
for that reason a question has now to be settled
once for all, which threatens to be continually
disturbing our good relations with our small
neighbours, although it has in very truth nothing
whatever to do with the independence of the Netherlands.
The conclusion of peace with France may
and shall afford the opportunity of incorporating
Luxemburg in the German Empire.

It is repugnant to us to revive to-day the
memory of the odious transaction which deprived
us of that territory—the single bitter memory in
the glorious history of the North German Confederation.
Suffice it that that German territory
which by the decision of Europe was once allotted

to the House of Orange and the Crown of Prussia,
in order to protect it against France's lust of
piracy, was suddenly sold and betrayed to France
by its own rulers. When the Prussian Government
entered a protest, it was confronted by the
unconcealed partisan disfavour of all the European
Powers. The fear of France lay heavily on the
world; it reads to us to-day like a farce, when we
read in the documents of those days how Lord
Stanley and Count Beust outrivalled each other
in depicting to our Government the fearful superiority
of French power; the French fleet would
occupy the attention of the greater portion of
our forces, would make it impossible for us to
protect South Germany, etc. Prussia, which
was honestly trying to display its love of peace in
an affair not altogether free from doubt, and was,
moreover, fully busied with the founding of the
new Confederation, gave up its right of garrisoning,
and contented itself with the inadequate
result, that France had to abandon her welcome
purchase. In place of the military protection
which Prussia had afforded the country up till then,
was substituted a moral protection, by which the
great Powers undertook a common responsibility
for the neutrality of the Grand Duchy. But
scarcely had the agreement been concluded, when
it at once lost all its value owing to the perfidious
interpretation put upon it by England. Amid
the exultant cheers of Parliament, Lord Stanley
declared that Great Britain would only take up
arms for Luxemburg's neutrality if the other
Great Powers did the same; the press, drunk with
peace, rejoiced that England's obligations were
not extended, but limited, by the May Convention—and
the politics of the Sinking Island-Kingdom
had taken a fresh step downwards.
After such words no description is requisite of the
deeds that might be expected from British statesmen;
nobody doubts that England would not have
let itself be disturbed in its neutral complacency,
even if a victorious French army had penetrated
into Luxemburg last August.

The joint European guarantee was from the
start an empty form, and the position of the little
neutral country has been rendered completely
untenable by the mighty revolutionary events of
recent weeks. If the German boundary advances
as far as Metz and Diedenhof, Luxemburg becomes
surrounded in the south, as in the north and
east, by German-Prussian territory, the country
no longer forms a buffer-State between France
and Prussia, and the object of the May Convention,
the idea of preventing friction between the two
great military Powers, vanishes of itself. Considering
the deadly enmity which will threaten
us yet a long time from Paris, the Prussian
Government could hardly tolerate seeing the
communications between Treves and Metz interrupted
by neutral territory; serious military
considerations compel Prussia's desire to plant
its standard again on those Luxemburg fortifications

on which it stood for fifty years, a screen
for Germany.

And is not the neutrality of the little country,
the artificial creation of a "nation luxembourgeoise,"
in very truth a disgrace to Germany?
Polyglot countries, like Belgium and Switzerland,
may justly be declared neutral, because their
mixed populations prevent them from taking partisan
parts in the national struggles of this century.
But to cut off two hundred thousand German
persons from their Fatherland in order to place
them under European guardianship, that was a
crime against common-sense and history, an insult
which could be offered only to this our hard-struggling
Germany. The little State is German
to the last hamlet, belongs to us by speech and
customs, by the memories of a thousand-years-old
history, as well as by the community of material
interests. And this country, which presented
us with three Emperors, which once revolted
against Philip of Burgundy in order to preserve
its German language, which, further, in the days
of the French Revolution, twice joined in the
national war against the hated French, this root-and-branch
German country is to-day under
French rule! The official language is French, the
laws of the country are derived from France and
Belgium. Since the injurious nine-years' treaty
with Belgium, people in Luxemburg have grown
accustomed, as in Brussels and Ghent, to admire
French methods as a mark of distinction. The

officials, who are moulded in French and Belgian
schools, introduce French arrogance from their
alien environment, radically oppose the German
spirit, change the honest old German place-names
of Klerf and Liebenbrunn into Clerveaux and
Septfontaines. The people are alienated from
the German system of government by the sins
of the Diet; they cannot forget that the German
Confederation once abandoned a half of the country
in undignified fashion to Belgium, and then
obligingly all the governmental pranks of reactionary
ministers. A fanatical clergy, a lying press
conducted by French and Belgians, no doubt
also maintained by French gold, foster their hatred
for the great Fatherland, and the Netherland
States gaze with indifference at the decline of the
German civilization.

Under such unhealthy conditions every kind of
political corruption of which the German nature
is capable has spread over this small people.
Whilst the German youth are shedding their
blood for the Eternal, for the Infinite, the Luxemburgers
are wallowing in the mire of materialism;
a superstitious belief in the life of this world has
emasculated their minds, they know nothing,
they want to know nothing except business and
pleasure. Whilst in Germany, amid hard strugglings,
a new, a more moral conception of liberty
is arising, which is rooted in the idea of duty,
there an existence without duties is praised as the
highest aim of life. They want to derive advantage

from the Customs Union, to which the country
owes the essence of its prosperity, without doing
the least service for Germany. They let the
Germans bleed for the freedom of the left bank of
the Rhine—including Luxemburg—they loudly
boast they have no fatherland, and reserve it to
themselves to heap abuse on Germans as slaves,
to shout to the German tide-waiters a scornful
"mer de pour la Prusse!"

Ought Germany any longer to endure this
European scandal, this parasitic plant without a
fatherland, which is battening on the trunk of
our Empire? The national State has the right
and duty of protecting its nationals all over the
world; it cannot endure that a German race should
be gradually transformed into a German-French
mongrel without any reason except the perversity
of a degenerate bureaucracy. There is only one
way of preventing it, as things are, namely, the
inclusion of the country in the German Empire.
The Reichstag, however, can allow this inclusion
only under two conditions: it must require
that the German tongue be used again as the
official language, and that the agreement binding
the Grand Duchy to the Kingdom of the Netherlands
shall be broken off. The bond of union
between the two States is certainly very loose;
still, in our Diet we got to know only too thoroughly
the unhallowed consequences of the blending
of German and foreign politics; although the
constitution of the Confederation says nothing

about it, we must set up for our new Empire the
infrangible principle: no foreign sovereign can
be a member of the German Confederation.

We do not mean that Germany should rightaway
declare the May Convention to be nullified
in consequence of the present war. Much rather
do we desire the free unanimity of all the parties
concerned. The support hitherto afforded by
France to Luxemburg independence is to-day
disappearing of itself. The infatuated resistance
of the French will presumably oblige the Confederate
general to increase his demands; it would then
be all the easier for the French Government,
upon the conclusion of peace, to make a binding
declaration, in return for some fair concession,
that it recognizes in advance the entry of Luxemburg
into the German Confederation. For the
conversion of the Luxemburgers themselves would
suffice a definite assurance, that henceforth Germany's
customs-boundary coincides with its political
boundary, and the customs-convention cannot
be renewed unless the Grand Duchy again
undertakes the duties of a Confederate territory.
Such will scarcely fail of its effect in that country,
where ideal reasons find no response, despite the
fiery enthusiasm for independence which is to-day
again turning the heads of the little people. Their
industries cannot flourish without the blessings
of German commercial freedom; they would be
bound to be ruined if the Small State tried to
form an independent market-region, and the same

would happen if it entered the Belgian customs
area.

Serious opposition can hardly be expected from
the Dutch Government, which has long been
weary of its troublesome neighbour. But the
head of the House of Orange has long been converted
to the commercial neutrality of those
patricians of Amsterdam, whom his great ancestors
formerly fought against; his heart, however
warmly it may beat for France, will find to-day
the clink of Prussian dollars quite as pleasant as
that of golden napoleons four years ago. An
understanding must also be possible with the
magnates of the joint House of Nassau, whose
rights were expressly reserved in the May Convention.
The simplest solution of the question
would certainly be arrived at if Prussia were to
acquire the country by purchase. Already the
Prussian State numbers fifty thousand Luxemburgers
among its citizens in the districts around
Bittburg and St. Vith; if the Grand Duchy and
French-Luxemburg, together with Diedenhof, were
to be taken over in addition, that misgoverned
and mutilated country would at last be united
again under one Crown—up to the Belgian portion.
But this solution, which is in every respect most
desirable, is not absolutely a necessity; German
interests primarily extend only so far that the
Principality be again adopted into our line of
defence, into the life of our State and culture.
Should, therefore, the joint House prefer to raise

up a Nassau Prince as a Prince of the Confederation
to the throne of Luxemburg, Germany cannot
refuse; such an arrangement would at any rate
be far preferable to the unreal conditions of today.
Lastly, we are yet in need of the agreement
of the European Powers. That also is obtainable;
for right and fairness are obviously on our side,
if we intend to impose similar charges on all
members of the Customs Union; moreover, England
has long felt the guarantee undertaken for
the neutrality of Luxemburg to be a wearisome
burden. However, everything depends entirely
on not commencing negotiations prematurely,
so that the neutral Powers may not find welcome
occasion to interfere in the Franco-German
negotiations.

Alsace, Lorraine, Luxemburg! What wounds
have been inflicted on German life in those
Marches of the Empire through the crimes of
long centuries, and how perseveringly will all the
healthy forces of the German State be obliged
to bestir themselves in order to keep in peace
what the sword has won! The task seems almost
too heavy for this generation, which has only just
rescued our Northern March from alien rulers.
Still, what is being accomplished to-day is but the
ripe fruit of the work of many generations. All
the industry, all the honesty and active power, all
the moral wealth, which our fathers awoke anew
in the deteriorated Fatherland, will work on our
side if we now dare to adapt the degenerate sons

of our West to German life; and the best that
we can achieve in peace can yet never approach
the deeds and sufferings of the heroes
who paid with their blood for the dawn of the
new times.