What is Coming? by H. G. Wells

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There can, of course, be no doubt of the good faith of Sir George
Makgill, but he could do the Kaiser no better service than to help in
consolidating every rank and class of German, by this organisation of
foolish violence of speech and act, by this profession of an irrational
and implacable hostility. His practical influence over here is trivial,
thanks to the general good sense and the love of fair play in our
people, but there can be little doubt that his intentions are about as
injurious to the future peace of the world as any intentions could be,
and there can be no doubt that intelligent use is made in Germany of the
frothings and ravings of his followers. "Here, you see, is the
disposition of the English," the imperialists will say to the German
pacifists. "They are dangerous lunatics. Clearly we must stick together
to the end." ...

The stuff of Sir George Makgill's league must not be taken as
representative of any considerable section of British opinion, which is
as a whole nearly as free from any sustained hatred of the Germans as it
was at the beginning of the war. There are, of course, waves of
indignation at such deliberate atrocities as the _Lusitania_ outrage or
the Zeppelin raids, Wittenberg will not easily be forgotten, but it
would take many Sir George Makgills to divert British anger from the
responsible German Government to the German masses.

That lack of any essential hatred does not mean that British opinion is
not solidly for the continuation of this war against militarist
imperialism to its complete and final defeat. But if that can be
defeated to any extent in Germany by the Germans, if the way opens to a
Germany as unmilitary and pacific as was Great Britain before this war,
there remains from the British point of view nothing else to fight
about. With the Germany of _Vorwaerts_ which, I understand, would
evacuate and compensate Belgium and Serbia, set up a buffer state in
Alsace-Lorraine, and another in a restored Poland (including Posen), the
spirit of the Allies has no profound quarrel at all, has never had any
quarrel. We would only too gladly meet that Germany at a green table
to-morrow, and set to work arranging the compensation of Belgium and
Serbia, and tracing over the outlines of the natural map of mankind the
new political map of Europe.

Still it must be admitted that not only in Great Britain but in all the
allied countries one finds a certain active minority corresponding to
Sir George Makgill's noisy following, who profess to believe that all
Germans to the third and fourth generation (save and except the
Hanoverian royal family domiciled in Great Britain) are a vile,
treacherous, and impossible race, a race animated by an incredible
racial vanity, a race which is indeed scarcely anything but a conspiracy
against the rest of mankind.

The ravings of many of these people can only be paralleled by the stuff
about the cunning of the Jesuits that once circulated in
ultra-Protestant circles in England. Elderly Protestant ladies used to
look under the bed and in the cupboard every night for a Jesuit, just as
nowadays they look for a German spy, and as no doubt old German ladies
now look for Sir Edward Grey. It may be useful therefore, at the present
time, to point out that not only is the aggressive German idea not
peculiar to Germany, not only are there endless utterances of French
Chauvinists and British imperialists to be found entirely as vain,
unreasonable and aggressive, but that German militarist imperialism is
so little representative of the German quality, that scarcely one of its
leading exponents is a genuine German.

Of course there is no denying that the Germans are a very distinctive
people, as distinctive as the French. But their distinctions are not
diabolical. Until the middle of the nineteenth century it was the
fashion to regard them as a race of philosophical incompetents. Their
reputation as a people of exceptionally military quality sprang up in
the weed-bed of human delusions between 1866 and 1872; it will certainly
not survive this war. Their reputation for organisation is another
matter. They are an orderly, industrious, and painstaking people, they
have a great respect for science, for formal education, and for
authority. It is their respect for education which has chiefly betrayed
them, and made them the instrument of Hohenzollern folly. Mr. F.M.
Hueffer has shown this quite conclusively in his admirable but ill-named
book, "When Blood is Their Argument." Their minds have been
systematically corrupted by base historical teaching, and the
inculcation of a rancid patriotism. They are a people under the sway of
organised suggestion. This catastrophic war and its preparation have
been their chief business for half a century; none the less their
peculiar qualities have still been displayed during that period; they
have still been able to lead the world in several branches of social
organisation and in the methodical development of technical science.
Systems of ideas are perhaps more readily shattered than built up; the
aggressive patriotism of many Germans must be already darkened by
serious doubts, and I see no inherent impossibility in hoping that the
mass of the Germans may be restored to the common sanity of mankind,
even in the twenty or thirty years of life that perhaps still remain for
me.

Consider the names of the chief exponents of the aggressive German idea,
and you will find that not one is German. The first begetter of
Nietzsche's "blond beast," and of all that great flood of rubbish about
a strange superior race with whitish hair and blue eyes, that has so
fatally rotted the German imagination, was a Frenchman named Gobineau.
We British are not altogether free from the disease. As a small boy I
read the History of J.R. Green, and fed my pride upon the peculiar
virtues of my Anglo-Saxon blood. ("Cp.," as they say in footnotes,
Carlyle and Froude.) It was not a German but a renegade Englishman of
the Englishman-hating Whig type, Mr. Houston Stewart Chamberlain, who
carried the Gobineau theory to that delirious level which claims Dante
and Leonardo as Germans, and again it was not a German but a British
peer, still among us, Lord Redesdale, who in his eulogistic preface to
the English translation of Chamberlain's torrent of folly, hinted not
obscurely that the real father of Christ was not the Jew, Joseph, but a
much more Germanic person. Neither Clausewitz, who first impressed upon
the German mind the theory of ruthless warfare, nor Bernhardi, nor
Treitschke, who did as much to build up the Emperor's political
imagination, strike one as bearing particularly German names. There are
indeed very grave grounds for the German complaint that Germany has been
the victim of alien flattery and alien precedents. And what after all is
the Prussian dream of world empire but an imitative response to the
British empire and the adventure of Napoleon? The very title of the
German emperor is the name of an Italian, Caesar, far gone in decay. And
the backbone of the German system at the present time is the Prussian,
who is not really a German at all but a Germanised Wend. Take away the
imported and imposed elements from the things we fight to-day, leave
nothing but what is purely and originally German, and you leave very
little. We fight dynastic ambition, national vanity, greed, and the
fruits of fifty years of basely conceived and efficiently conducted
education.

The majority of sensible and influential Englishmen are fully aware of
these facts. This does not alter their resolution to beat Germany
thoroughly and finally, and, if Germany remains Hohenzollern after the
war, to do their utmost to ring her in with commercial alliances,
tariffs, navigation and exclusion laws that will keep her poor and
powerless and out of mischief so long as her vice remains in her. But
these considerations of the essential innocence of the German do make
all this systematic hostility, which the British have had forced upon
them, a very uncongenial and reluctant hostility. Pro-civilisation, and
not Anti-German, is the purpose of the Allies. And the speculation of
just how relentlessly and for how long this ring of suspicion and
precaution need be maintained about Germany, of how soon the German may
decide to become once more a good European, is one of extraordinary
interest to every civilised man. In other words, what are the prospects
of a fairly fundamental revolution in German life and thought and
affairs in the years immediately before us?

Sec.2

In a sense every European country must undergo revolutionary changes as
a consequence of the enormous economic exhaustion and social
dislocations of this war. But what I propose to discuss here is the
possibility of a real political revolution, in the narrower sense of
the word, in Germany, a revolution that will end the Hohenzollern
system, the German dynastic system, altogether, that will democratise
Prussia and put an end for ever to that secretive scheming of military
aggressions which is the essential quarrel of Europe with Germany. It is
the most momentous possibility of our times, because it opens the way to
an alternative state of affairs that may supersede the armed watching
and systematic war of tariffs, prohibitions, and exclusions against the
Central Empires that must quite unavoidably be the future attitude of
the Pledged Allies to any survival of the Hohenzollern empire.

We have to bear in mind that in this discussion we are dealing with
something very new and quite untried hitherto by anything but success,
that new Germany whose unification began with the spoliation of Denmark
and was completed at Versailles. It is not a man's lifetime old. Under
the state socialism and aggressive militarism of the Hohenzollern regime
it had been led to a level of unexampled pride and prosperity, and it
plunged shouting and singing into this war, confident of victories. It
is still being fed with dwindling hopes of victory, no longer unstinted
hopes, but still hopes--by a sort of political bread-card system. The
hopes outlast the bread-and-butter, but they dwindle and dwindle. How is
this parvenu people going to stand the cessation of hope, the
realisation of the failure and fruitlessness of such efforts as no
people on earth have ever made before? How are they going to behave when
they realise fully that they have suffered and died and starved and
wasted all their land in vain? When they learn too that the cause of the
war was a trick, and the Russian invasion a lie? They have a large
democratic Press that will not hesitate to tell them that, that does
already to the best of its ability disillusion them. They are a
carefully trained and educated and disciplined people, it is true[4];
but the solicitude of the German Government everywhere apparent, thus to
keep the resentment of the people directed to the proper quarter, is, I
think, just one of the things that are indicative of the revolutionary
possibilities in Germany. The Allied Governments let opinion, both in
their own countries and in America, shift for itself; they do not even
trouble to mitigate the inevitable exasperation of the military
censorship by an intelligent and tactful control. The German Government,
on the other hand, has organised the putting of the blame upon other
shoulders than its own elaborately and ably from the very beginning of
the war. It must know its own people best, and I do not see why it
should do this if there were not very dangerous possibilities ahead for
itself in the national temperament.

[Footnote 4: A recent circular, which _Vorwaerts_ quotes, sent by the
education officials to the teachers of Frankfurt-am-Main, points out the
necessity of the "beautiful task" of inculcating a deep love for the
House of Hohenzollern (Crown Prince, grin and all), and concludes, "All
efforts to excuse or minimise or explain the disgraceful acts which our
enemies have committed against Germans all over the world are to be
firmly opposed by you should you see any signs of these efforts entering
the schools."]

It is one of the commonplaces of this question that in the past the
Germans have always been loyal subjects and never made a revolution. It
is alleged that there has never been a German republic. That is by no
means conclusively true. The nucleus of Swiss freedom was the
German-speaking cantons about the Lake of Lucerne; Tell was a German,
and he was glorified by the German Schiller. No doubt the Protestant
reformation was largely a business of dukes and princes, but the
underlying spirit of that revolt also lay in the German national
character. The Anabaptist insurrection was no mean thing in rebellions,
and the history of the Dutch, who are, after all, only the extreme
expression of the Low German type, is a history of the most stubborn
struggle for freedom in Europe. This legend of German docility will not
bear close examination. It is true that they are not given to spasmodic
outbreaks, and that they do not lend themselves readily to intrigues and
pronunciamentos, but there is every reason to suppose that they have the
heads to plan and the wills to carry out as sound and orderly and
effective a revolution as any people in Europe. Before the war drove
them frantic, the German comic papers were by no means suggestive of an
abject worship of authority and royalty for their own sakes. The
teaching of all forms of morality and sentimentality in schools produces
not only belief but reaction, and the livelier and more energetic the
pupil the more likely he is to react rather than accept.

Whatever the feelings of the old women of Germany may be towards the
Kaiser and his family, my impression of the opinion of Germans in
general is that they believed firmly in empire, Kaiser and militarism
wholly and solely because they thought these things meant security,
success, triumph, more and more wealth, more and more Germany, and all
that had come to them since 1871 carried on to the _n_th degree.... I do
not think that all the schoolmasters of Germany, teaching in unison at
the tops of their voices, will sustain that belief beyond the end of
this war.

At present every discomfort and disappointment of the German people is
being sedulously diverted into rage against the Allies, and particularly
against the English. This is all very well as long as the war goes on
with a certain effect of hopefulness. But what when presently the beam
has so tilted against Germany that an unprofitable peace has become
urgent and inevitable? How can the Hohenzollern suddenly abandon his
pose of righteous indignation and make friends with the accursed enemy,
and how can he make any peace at all with us while he still proclaims us
accursed? Either the Emperor has to go to his people and say, "We
promised you victory and it is defeat," or he has to say, "It is not
defeat, but we are going to make peace with these Russian barbarians who
invaded us, with the incompetent English who betrayed us, with all these
degenerate and contemptible races you so righteously hate and despise,
upon such terms that we shall never be able to attack them again. This
noble and wonderful war is to end in this futility and--these graves.
You were tricked into it, as you were tricked into war in 1870--but this
time it has not turned out quite so well. And besides, after all, we
find we can continue to get on with these people." ...

In either case, I do not see how he can keep the habitual and cultivated
German hate pointing steadily away from himself. So long as the war is
going on that may be done, but when the soldiers come home the hate will
come home as well. In times of war peoples may hate abroad and with some
unanimity. But after the war, with no war going on or any prospect of a
fresh war, with every exploiter and every industrial tyrant who has made
his unobtrusive profits while the country scowled and spat at England,
stripped of the cover of that excitement, then it is inevitable that
much of this noble hate of England will be seen for the cant it is. The
cultivated hate of the war phase, reinforced by the fresh hate born of
confusion and misery, will swing loose, as it were, seeking dispersedly
for objects. The petty, incessant irritations of proximity will count
for more; the national idea for less. The Hohenzollerns and the Junkers
will have to be very nimble indeed if the German accomplishment of hate
does not swing round upon them.

It is a common hypothesis with those who speculate on the probable
effects of these disillusionments that Germany may break up again into
its component parts. It is pointed out that Germany is, so to speak, a
palimpsest, that the broad design of the great black eagle and the
imperial crown are but newly painted over a great number of
particularisms, and that these particularisms may return. The empire of
the Germans may break up again. That I do not believe. The forces that
unified Germany lie deeper than the Hohenzollern adventure; print, paper
and the spoken word have bound Germany now into one people for all time.
None the less those previous crowns and symbols that still show through
the paint of the new design may help greatly, as that weakens under the
coming stresses, to disillusion men about its necessity. There was, they
will be reminded, a Germany before Prussia, before Austria for the
matter of that. The empire has been little more than the first German
experiment in unity. It is a new-fangled thing that came and may go
again--leaving Germany still a nation, still with the sense of a common
Fatherland.

Let us consider a little more particularly the nature of the mass of
population whose collective action in the years immediately ahead of us
we are now attempting to forecast. Its social strata are only very
inexactly equivalent to those in the countries of the Pledged Allies.
First there are the masses of the people. In England for purposes of
edification we keep up the legend of the extreme efficiency of Germany,
the high level of German education, and so forth. The truth is that the
average _elementary_ education of the common people in Britain is
superior to that of Germany, that the domestic efficiency of the British
common people is greater, their moral training better, and their
personal quality higher. This is shown by a number of quite conclusive
facts of which I will instance merely the higher German general
death-rate, the higher German infantile death-rate, the altogether
disproportionate percentage of crimes of violence in Germany, and the
indisputable personal superiority of the British common soldier over his
German antagonist. It is only when we get above the level of the masses
that the position is reversed. The ratio of public expenditure upon
secondary and higher education in Germany as compared with the
expenditure upon elementary education is out of all proportion to the
British ratio.

Directly we come to the commercial, directive, official, technical and
professional classes in Germany, we come to classes far more highly
trained, more alert intellectually, more capable of collective action,
and more accessible to general ideas, than the less numerous and less
important corresponding classes in Britain. This great German middle
class is the strength and substance of the new Germany; it has increased
proportionally to the classes above and below it, it has developed
almost all its characteristics during the last half-century. At its
lower fringe it comprehends the skilled and scientifically trained
artisans, it supplies the brains of social democracy, and it reaches up
to the world of finance and quasi-state enterprise. And it is the "dark
horse" in all these speculations.

Hitherto this middle class has been growing almost unawares. It has been
so busy coming into existence and growing, there has been so much to do
since 1871, that it has had scarcely a moment to think round the general
problem of politics at all. It has taken the new empire for granted as a
child takes its home for granted, and its state of mind to-day must be
rather like that of an intelligent boy who suddenly discovers that his
father's picturesque and wonderful speculations have led to his arrest
and brought the brokers into the house, and that there is nothing for it
but to turn to and take control of the family affairs.

In Germany, the most antiquated and the most modern of European states,
the old dynastic Germany of the princes and junkers has lasted on by
virtue of exceptional successes and prestige into the world of steel and
electricity. But their prestige has paled before the engineering of
Krupp; their success evaporates. A new nation awakens to
self-consciousness only to find itself betrayed into apparently
irreconcilable hostility against the rest of mankind....

What will be the quality of the monarch and court and junkerdom that
will face this awaking new Germany?

The monarch will be before very long the present Crown Prince. The
Hohenzollerns have at least the merit of living quickly, and the present
Emperor draws near his allotted term. He will break a record in his
family if he lives another dozen years. So that quite soon after the war
this new disillusioned Germany will be contemplating the imperial graces
of the present Crown Prince. In every way he is an unattractive and
uninspiring figure; he has identified himself completely with that
militarism that has brought about the European catastrophe; in
repudiating him Germany will repudiate her essential offence against
civilisation, and his appears to be the sort of personality that it is a
pleasure to repudiate. He or some kindred regent will be the symbol of
royalty in Germany through all those years of maximum stress and
hardship ahead. Through-out the greater part of Germany the tradition of
loyalty to his house is not a century old. And the real German loyalty
is racial and national far more than dynastic. It is not the
Hohenzollern over all that they sing about; it is Deutschland. (And--as
in the case of all imperfectly civilised people--songs of hate for
foreigners.) But it needed a decadent young American to sing:

"Thou Prince of Peace,
Thou God of War,"

to the dismal rhetorician of Potsdam. Real emperors reconcile and
consolidate peoples, for an empire is not a nation; but the
Hohenzollerns have never dared to be anything but sedulously national,
"echt Deutsch" and advocates of black-letter. They know the people they
have to deal with.

This new substantial middle mass of Germany has never been on friendly
terms with the Germany of the court and the landowner. It has inherited
a burgerlich tradition and resented even while it tolerated the swagger
of the aristocratic officer. It tolerated it because that sort of thing
was supposed to be necessary to the national success. But Munich, the
comic papers, Herr Harden, _Vorwaerts_, speak, I think, for the central
masses of German life far more truly than any official utterances do.
They speak in a voice a little gross, very sensible, blunt, with a kind
of heavy humour. That German voice one may not like, but one must needs
respect it. It is, at any rate, not bombastic. It is essentially honest.
When the imperial eagle comes home with half its feathers out like a
crow that has met a bear; when the surviving aristocratic officers
reappear with a vastly diminished swagger in the biergartens, I believe
that the hitherto acquiescent middle classes and skilled artisan class
of German will entirely disappoint those people who expect them to
behave either with servility or sentimental loyalty. The great
revolutionary impulse of the French was passionate and generous. The
revolutionary impulse of Germany may be even more deadly; it may be
contemptuous. It may be they will not even drag emperor and nobles down;
they will shove them aside....

In all these matters one must ask the reader to enlarge his perspectives
at least as far back as the last three centuries. The galaxy of German
monarchies that has over-spread so much of Europe is a growth of hardly
more than two centuries. It is a phase in the long process of the
break-up of the Roman Empire and of the catholic system that inherited
its tradition. These royalties have formed a class apart, breeding only
among themselves, and attempting to preserve a sort of caste
internationalism in the face of an advance in human intelligence, a
spread of printing, reading, and writing that makes inevitably for the
recrudescence of national and race feeling, and the increasing
participation of the people in government.

In Russia and England these originally German dynasties are meeting the
problems of the new time by becoming national. They modify themselves
from year to year. The time when Britain will again have a Queen of
British race may not be very remote. The days when the affairs of Europe
could be discussed at Windsor in German and from a German standpoint
ended with the death of Queen Victoria, and it is only in such
improvised courts as those of Greece and Bulgaria that the national
outlook can still be contemplated from a foreign standpoint and
discussed in a foreign tongue. The age when the monarchical system made
the courts of three-quarters of Europe a German's Fatherland has ended
for ever. And with that, the last rational advantage of monarchy and
royalist sentimentality disappears from the middle-class German's point
of view.

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