University of Virginia Library

FOREWORD

GREAT national movements and national
passions or enthusiasms since the Middle
Ages have always been connected with the names
of leaders (preachers, writers, or statesmen), and not
infrequently, with that of one particular leader
whose words have acted upon the people as an
inspiration, and who has given the keynote and
character to the movement. It is probable
(Carlyle to the contrary notwithstanding) that
each of these national movements would have
taken place, even although the particular individual
and leader had not existed. When, however,
a revolution or an outbreak of any kind shapes
itself on the lines of some given teaching, it is
proper to study the character and the doctrines of
the teacher. The history of the French Revolution
could not be considered without analysis of
Rousseau and his writings, and, in like manner,
the present action of Germany, which amounts to
a revolution, in initiating the European War of
1914, will always be connected in history with the
teachings of Treitschke. Americans are called
upon at this time to arrive at an opinion in regard
to the causation of the war, the nature of the
issues that are being fought over, and the factors

which are influencing the combatants. It is
important, on more grounds than one, to arrive
at an understanding of the influences which are
directing the present policy of Germany, and which
have imbued, not only the Imperial Government,
but the mass of Germans back of the Emperor
and his counsellors, with the craze for world
domination and with the conviction that it is
their duty to enforce German Kultur (a very
different thing from what we understand by
culture) upon all civilized communities.

Treitschke has been called "the Machiavelli of
the Nineteenth Century," but his words were
directed not only to monarchs and to other leaders
of the State, but to the people as a whole. The
greed for domination dates from the time when
Treitschke began to write and to lecture on national
politics and on German ideals. The cry
of Deutschland über alles was to him more than an
ideal, it was a religion, and through his forcible
teaching it has become the burning faith of the
nation as a whole. Throughout the whole of
Treitschke's writings his conviction of the necessity
for the supremacy of Germans over all other
peoples is enforced with all the vigour and skill at
his command. To England he directs his most
venomous outpouring. "English policy," says
Treitschke, "which aims at the unreasonable goal
of world supremacy, has always, as its foundation
principle, reckoned on the misfortunes of other
nations."

It seems evident that the instigation to the
curious hate of England and to the conviction that
for the development of Germany the destruction
of the British Empire was essential, is due to
Treitschke. He died, in Berlin, in 1896, and it is
his pupils, the middle-aged men of to-day, Bernhardi
and others, who have planned the present
fight of Germany for the domination of Europe.
Bismarck was Treitschke's valued friend, and
William II has been nurtured on his teachings.
These teachings give the philosophy for the present
political and military action. The essays contained
in this volume present the opinions of
Treitschke on the policy and the destiny of Germany,
while the critical biography, written with
the full sympathy of a close friend, gives an insight
into the character of the man himself.

Professor J. H. Morgan says:

"If Treitschke was a casuist at all (and as a
rule he is refreshingly, if brutally, frank), his was
the supreme casuistry of the doctrine that the
end justifies the means. That the means may
corrupt the end or become an end in themselves
he never fairly realized. He honestly believed
that war was the nurse of manly sentiment and
heroic enterprise. He feared the commercialism
of modern times, and despised England because
he judged her wars to have been always undertaken
with a view to the conquest of markets.
He sneers at the Englishman who `scatters the
blessings of civilization with a Bible in one hand

and an opium pipe in the other.' He honestly
believed that Germany exhibited a purity of
domestic life, a pastoral simplicity, and a deep
religious faith to which no European country
could approach. He has written passages of
noble and tender sentiment, in which he celebrates
the piety of the peasant, whose religious exercises
were hallowed wherever the German tongue was
spoken, by the massive faith in Luther's great
hymn. Those who would understand the strength
of Treitschke's influence on his generation must not
lose sight of these purer elements in his teachings.
He was the first preacher of the doctrine that
Germany must become a power across the sea.
He became indeed the champion of the Junkers,
and his history is a kind of hagiography of the
Hohenzollerns. He rested his hopes for Germany
on the bureaucracy and the army. By a quite
natural transition he was led on from his championship
of the unity of Germany to a conception of
her rôle as a world-power. He is the true father of
Weltpolitik."

Like Mommsen, Treitschke insisted that the
people of the conquered provinces must be "forced
to be free," that Morality and History (which for
him are much the same thing) proclaim they are
German without knowing it. He says:

"We Germans, who know Germany and France,
know better what is good for Alsace than the
unhappy people themselves who through their
French associations have lived in ignorance of the

new Germany. We have in the enormous changes
of these times too often seen in glad astonishment
the immortal working of the moral forces of
History (`das unsterbliche Fortwirken der sittlichen
Mächte der Geschichte') to be able to believe in the
unconditional value on this matter of a Referendum.
We invoke the men of the past against the
present."

The ruthless pedantry of this is characteristically
Prussian. It is easy to appeal to the past against
the present, to the dead against the living. Dead
men tell no tales. Treitschke admitted that the
Alsatians did not love the Germans; there was,
he ruefully confessed, something rather unlovely
about the civilizing methods of Prussia.

Lord Acton, writing in 1886, pronounced
Treitschke to be "the one writer of history who
was more brilliant and more powerful than Droysen."
"He writes," says Acton, "with the force
and fire of Mommsen, and he accounts for the
motives that stir a nation as well as for the councils
that govern it."

One of Treitschke's pupils writes of him: "His
style is full of colour and of movement; it is
brilliant and thought-abounding; nervous, energetic
feeling swings the reader along, while vast
learning is digested and bent to the purposes of the
author." Germans quote Treitschke as no historian
has ever been quoted by English or by French;
one may say that, in the interpretation of history,
Treitschke is to the present generation of Germans

an inspired scripture, a bible. The political
leaders refer to him as final authority. Treitschke,
at his death, looked forward with confidence to
the day when the world would find healing at the
touch of the German character. "God will see
to it that war always recurs as a drastic medicine
for the human race." Says Treitschke's pupil
Bernhardi: "War is essential not merely as a means
to political ambition and territorial aggrandizement,
but as a moral discipline, almost in fact as
a spiritual inspiration."

Treitschke had a keen dislike and distrust for
America. He says, "Germany can learn nothing
from the United States." This is a natural
utterance for a man who was the fiercest opponent
in his generation of democracy and of democratic
institutions.

Treitschke's pupil Clausewitz quotes his master
as saying in substance: "Self-imposed restrictions,
almost imperceptible and hardly worth mentioning,
termed Usages of International Law, accompany
violence without essentially impairing its value."

In the introduction to the Politik, Treitschke
says in regard to the sanctity of war: "It is to be
conceived as an ordinance set by God. It is the
most powerful maker of nations; it is politics
par excellence." "What a perversion of morality,"
says Treitschke, "it would be if one struck out of
humanity heroism" (Heldentum). But Treitschke's
Heldentum is a different thing from what
the civilized world has understood as heroism,

He forgets the caution of his contemporary Mommsen,
who says: "Have a care, lest in this State,
which has been at once a power in arms and a
power in intelligence, the intelligence should
vanish, and there should remain nothing but the
pure military condition." The fruits of Heldentum
are Louvain smoking in ashes to the sky.
The philosophy of Treitschke is to-day the
philosophy of the Prussian Government and of
Germany behind Prussia; it is the philosophy
under which the attempt is being made to crush
France and to break up the British Empire. It
is the teaching that has desolated Belgium and that
has brought war upon the world.