Read Ebook: An Inquiry into the Principles of Political Oeconomy (Vol. 2 of 2) Being an essay on the science of domestic policy in free nations. In which are particularly considered population agriculture trade industry money coin interest circulation banks exchange by Steuart James Sir

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Editor: B. O. Flower

THE ARENA.

AUGUST, 1891.

THE UNITY OF GERMANY.

BY MME. BLAZE DE BURY.

"THE IDEA WHENCE SPRANG THE FACT."

Since the Great French Revolution of 1789 and its immediate consequence in the military despotism of Bonaparte, nothing has occurred that has so convulsed the Old World and so altered the conditions of men and things, as the establishment of the United German Empire in 1870. The men of our time are obliged to know how this event came about, or remain in ignorance of all that has happened during the twenty years following it--that is, to ignore their own political status.

Now two records of this enormous change in all our destinies exist; as yet there are but two, and modern men are bound in duty to take cognizance of them. One is the famous "History," written in Germany by Heinrich von Sybel; the other the work of Prof. L?vy Br?hl, published in France. Both must be read.

"History of the Creation of United Germany." 5 vols. Heinrich v. Sybel, Berlin, 1890.

This it was not; but this was at the same time the view it suited the vanity of the French nation to take of it; accordingly, Sybel's theory was rapidly accepted, and French public opinion did its utmost to cause the unity of Germany, as recognized in 1871, to be regarded as an accident, the creation of one man, promoted, for that matter ungrudgingly, to the rank of the "greatest European statesman," but whose work, being that of an individual, and therefore accidental, might quite conceivably be eventually undone. Sybel's theory, being official and Bismarckian, puts forth in truth the French conception, and is, as a matter of fact, the very opposite of the national German one.

The Germans who agreed with Sybel were the men of the old regime, with far less, be it said, of the "cute" chancellor himself, than of Marshal Moltke, the chancellor being far more distant from the materialism of the "Grand Fritz" with his "big battalions" than were the veterans of the drilled and disciplined Prussian army. Bismarck was divided between two creeds: he knew too much psychology to believe solely in the supremacy of pipeclay, but he was at the same time not averse to the creation of a revived German empire by his own genius.

Hence chiefly the confusion; for men's minds were confused,--in France determinedly, and even in Germany, uncertain.

Granted the principle of personal intervention, of the success of either one man or of even a group of two or three leading spirits, who was the original inventor, who the doer of the deed, the framer of the fact that threatened the world with a new master?

This query was not started for eighteen long years; not until the catastrophe that threatened the House of Hohenzollern with the loss of its noblest son, served to recall to the mind of all Europe what a thorough hero and citizen, what a perfect, undeviating German the crown prince had always been.

The reader who for the first time takes cognizance of the contents of these formidable volumes, is overwhelmed by the amount of attestations they present him with, by his own inability to refute them, or by counter statements substitute a truer appreciation of what did really occur. The dry narrative of mere fact is thus, but the impression it should produce as of a fact lived through is wanting.

From 1848-50 to 1889-90, observe the rapid succession of so-called "unexpected" events: The rise to the rule of Democracy in France; the restoration to power of the despotic Bonapartist empire, whence issued the revival of the nationalistic theory, leading on one side to revolution, on the other to conservative resistance and the supremacy of a warlike state like Prussia. We need go no further for the determining cause of the two sovereign influences! Cavour and Bismarck, the two men who predominate our half century, spring from a common necessity, and in reality emerge from the conference of 1856, misnamed the "Crimean Race!"

"I was the egg," the chancellor was wont to say, "whence my royal master foresaw that unity might perhaps be hatched;" and on Orsini's scaffold the Piedmontese seer knew full well that the Corsican Carbonaro could not elude the fate lying in wait for him, disguised in the freedom of Italy. You can dissever none of these facts one from the other, and we now approach the "one man principle." The protagonists stand face to face, rather than side by side, but both are equally the unconscious promoters of that antagonism between Germany and France which, in fact, has shaped, and still shapes, the whole policy of Europe.

From this single grand outline, all the minor lines either start, or towards it tend, indirectly, in convergent curves.

This is the turning-point. The one man theory apparently endures; but physically and morally, the vision of disintegration rises, threatening all; and whence the "New Order" is to come, above all morally, none divine.

We reach here the close of the preliminary period. Up to the 4th of September, 1870, and for a few years beyond, State policy is the proper name for whatever occurs; we deal to a large extent with mathematical quantities, with impersonal obstructions. Statesmen and statecraft are in their place, and fill it; individuals, however distinguished, are, as it were, sheathed in collective symbols and represented by principles. Documentary evidence suffices now! Treaties, minutes, diplomatic reports, instruments of all descriptions, are really the requisite agents of this inanimate diplomatic narration. State papers are the adequate expression, the exclusive speech of mere states, and of this speech Heinrich v. Sybel is one of the foremost living masters.

It would be next to impossible to find anywhere a loftier, clearer, or more minutely correct record of what preceded and caused the war of '70, than in the earlier volumes of Sybel's "History"; for up to the reverses of France, and the substitution of German for French predominance, we are still--in all connected with Germany,--in presence of the Prussia of the past, of the Prussia whose social conditions were fixed by Frederick the Great. Men are simply pawns upon the board; their fate has no influence on others--the fate of kings, queens, and high chivalric orders, is alone of any import to the constituted realm. Nations obey and question not. They are represented by mouldy, defunct formulae, and as yet no living popular voice, save that of the revolution of 1789, has been raised to ask where was the underlying life of the innominate crowd? But the revolution spoke too loudly, and like the tragedy queen in Hamlet, "protested too much."

For these reasons this history must be accepted as the perfect chronicle of the occurrences which marked the time before and immediately after the fall of S?dan.

When later the dormant life that was underneath awoke, breathed, and became manifest, Sybel's official tone no longer struck the true note; the heart of peoples had begun to beat, and disturbed its vibrations. Humanity was astir everywhere, and setting the barriers of etiquette at defiance. Not only were dry registers based on blue books insufficient, but the failure of the vital power that engenders other and further life began to be felt. There was no pulse; the current was stagnant, had no onward flow.

When this moment came, the truth of the narrative ceased. Henceforth, it told of only the things of another age, and told them in the dialect of a bygone tongue. It was the official report of what had taken place in Old Russia written involuntarily under the omnipotent but benumbing inspiration of the spirit of caste.

In those words M. Sorel proclaimed the concrete sense of the book, and no doubt was left as to what was the meaning of the author who had so freely undertaken to investigate the "developments of the German national conscience."

Life of Monckton Milnes, first Lord Houghton, by Wemyss Reid. 2 vols. London, 1891.

It is very well to take a Leibniz or Frederick the Great for a starting-point, but it all goes immeasurably farther back than that. Luther and his Bible open one large historic gate. The Bible heads all! In 1813, writes General Clausewitz to the so-called Great Gascon, the prime impetus was a religious one, and his own words are: "If I could only hang a Bible to the equipments of my troopers I could do with them all that Cromwell did with his Ironsides!" Two centuries before, this had been the feeling of Gustavus Adolphus, who fought for Protestant Germany with his Bible at his saddle-bow.

The heroic founder of the Bavarian monarchy, Otho of Writtelsbach, was betrayed shamefully by his friend, the Emperor Philip, of Suabia, and slew him for his treachery. This is one of the oldest dramas on the German stage.

Count Bismarck proved his political foresight by the rapidity with which he seized on the Schleswig-Holstein question as being the axis on which turned the entire evolution of the imperial German unity. About that he hesitated not one moment. He adopted the whole theory of Dahlmann, who alone spoke it out in words in 1848-9, but he feared to plunge at one leap into the vortex of his own threatening conclusions and tried for several years to stave off the "pay day." He was somewhat slower to recognize the identity of feeling through all the Germanic races, to realize the equally strong vibration, the psychologic harmony quivering through heart and soul from North to South, through the mysteriously hidden dramas of fifteen hundred years. He believed himself a narrow Particularist Borussian, a "Pomeranian Giant," and let a score of years go by before clearly making out by touch that the strange change of tonality, of sound, and significance that superposed the patriotism of the South to that of the North was a mere inharmonic change, and that according to the rotation of the two circles, each, in reality, underlay the other in turn.

This, the fearful period between the Crimean War, when first Cavour stepped forth to the incident of Ems, when the die was cast, this was the really magnificent passage in the great chancellor's career, for this was the time of possible doubt when responsibility lay so heavy that to elude it might be called prudence, and which to have survived is already a proof of superiority over common humanity.

And here we assert the true grandeur of the precursor,--of the one whom we have called the inventor, and who undeniably was so--of Cavour! There can be no question that his own intimate familiarity with the details of the Bond of Virtue and the War of Freedom of the glorious epoch when modern Germany headed and achieved the victorious movement against the world's debasement,--brought distinctly to Bismarck's mental vision the splendor of Cavour's impossibly unequal contest for Italian freedom! The situations were essentially much alike, but so much grander for the Italian statesman, Italy's odds being so immeasurably longer! But still the likeness came out, and the future chancellor could in no way aspire to be an initiator. The end was still a gigantic one, and one to which no true, brave patriot dared be false as an ideal,--but how as to the execution? As to the practical means of carrying out conceptions that might daily be doomed to alteration?

The celebrated victory of the Great Elector, that made Prussia into a kingdom.

There it was again that the figure of Cavour arose supreme; his long, inexhaustible patience, his undying hopes, his sacrifices day by day of the very springs of life for a self-imposed duty,--these were his titles to immortal fame, these constituted his sovereign right to success. But was not the worst probation over when Waterloo was won, and was it not an accepted theory that the Vienna Congress had settled all the vexed questions of ancient Europe? Any further movement, therefore, might seem merely a disturbance. This, for conservative statesmen above all, was a dilemma.

Germany had liberated not Germany only, but the world in 1813, and had already had her Cavours!

There was no denying it: the Cavour of Germany was Stein. But was the work done? Had the Congress of Vienna settled anything, for was that still left to do without which the independence and well-being of forty millions of Germans was unguaranteed, and the peace of all Europe uninsured? If so, what remained to be achieved? to complete what the German Cavour, the Precursor Stein, had begun, to embody and make real the glorious dreams of which Queen Louise had been the symbol, the Joan of Arc?

That, indeed, brought the Hohenzollerns on the scene, and lent to prosaic history its legend, giving to Frederick's "big battalions" the white-robed heroine who should lead them on.

It was the problem to which no German of the North could show indifference; and it was the one subject which brought Prussia to the fore, and put her reigning house in the van, forcing the Hohenzollerns into predominance. This was a crucial point, and wondrous to record! the will of Bismarck on that exceedingly curious detail brought the Hapsburgs together with the Hohenzollerns; Frederick with Marie-Ther?se, Wallenstein's camp with Rebels, in an unescapable atmosphere of rank Germanism!

When the quick-witted French public applied to Professor L?vy Br?hl's work the title of "The idea whence comes the fact," they awarded it its permanent signification; it is the development of the German conscience that causes the imperial unity of Germany, and no one is more thoroughly aware of that than the famous chancellor.

We feel with whomsoever was a witness of the crowning struggle, that nothing can even paint its gigantic character more aptly than the concluding phrase of the now famous French historian:--

The unity of Germany was the creation of no individual. German unity and the imperial unity sprang from the whole past of German history and German thought. The State existing now is the outcome of Germany's own self, of the idea, of the soul of Germany.

"SHOULD THE NATION OWN THE RAILWAYS?"

BY C. WOOD DAVIS.

The first part of this admirable essay appeared in July ARENA.

First would be the stability and practical uniformity of rates now impossible, as they are subject to change by hundreds of officials, and are often made for the purpose of enriching such officials. State and federal laws have had the effect of making discriminations less public and less numerous, but it is doubtful if they are less effective in enriching officials and their partners, although it may be necessary to be more careful in covering tracks. That they are continued is within the cognizance of every well-informed shipper, and are made clear by such cases as that of Counselman and Peasley, now before the United States Supreme Court. Counselman and Peasley--one a large shipper and the other a prominent railway official--refused to testify before a United States grand jury upon the plea that to do so might criminate themselves; the federal law making it a criminal offence to make or benefit by discriminating rates. Counselman had been given rates on corn, some five cents less per hundred pounds than others, from Kansas and Nebraska points to Chicago.

The outrageous character of this discrimination will appear when we reflect that five cents per one hundred pounds is an enormous profit on corn that the grower has sold at from eighteen to twenty-two cents per one hundred pounds, and that such a margin would tend to drive every one but the railway officials and their secret partners out of the trade, as has practically been the case on many western roads. Doubtless such rates are sometimes made in order to take the commodity over a certain line, and there is no divide with the officials; but the effect upon the competitors of the favored shipper and the public is none the less injurious, and such practices would not obtain under national ownership, when railway users would be treated with honesty and impartiality, which the experience of half a century shows to be impossible with corporate ownership.

Referring to the rate question in their last report, the Interstate Commerce Commission says: "If we go no farther than the railroad managers themselves for information, we shall not find that it is claimed that railroad service, as a whole, is conducted without unjust discriminations."

"If rates are secretly cut, or if rebates are given to large shippers, the fact of itself shows the rates which are charged to the general public are unreasonable, for they are necessarily made higher than they ought to be in order to provide for the cut or to pay the rebate."

"If the carrier habitually carries a great number of people free, its regular rates are made the higher to cover the cost; if heavy commissions are paid for obtaining business, the rates are made the higher that the net revenues may not suffer in consequence; if scalpers are directly or indirectly supported by the railroad companies, the general public refunds to the companies what the support costs."

The Commission quotes a Chicago railway manager as saying: "Rates are absolutely demoralized and neither shippers, passengers, railways, or the public in general make anything by this state of affairs. Take passenger rates for instance; they are very low; but who benefits by the reduction? No one but the scalpers.... In freight matters the case is just the same. Certain shippers are allowed heavy rebates, while others are made to pay full rates.... The management is dishonest on all sides, and there is not a road in the country that can be accused of living up to the interstate law. Of course when some poor devil comes along and wants a pass to save him from starvation, he has several clauses of the interstate act read to him; but when a rich shipper wants a pass, why he gets it at once."

From years of ineffectual efforts on the part of State and national legislatures and commissions to regulate the rate business, it would appear that the only remedy is national ownership, which would place the rate-making power in one body with no inducement to act otherwise than fairly and impartially, and this would simplify the whole business and relegate an army of traffic managers, general freight agents, soliciting agents, brokers, scalpers, and hordes of traffic association officials to more useful callings while relieving the honest user of the railway of intolerable burthens.

Under corporate control, railways and their officials have taken possession of the majority of the mines which furnish the fuel so necessary to domestic and industrial life, and there are but few coalfields where they do not fix the price at which so essential an article shall be sold, and the whole nation is thus forced to pay undue tribute.

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