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But I am quite unable to see that our Junkers are less susceptible to the influence of the Press than the people educated by public elementary schools. On the contrary, our Democrats are more fool-proof than our Plutocrats; and the ravings our Junkers send to the papers for nothing in war time would be dear at a halfpenny a line.
But whether this proposition and refusal in fact were made, can be learned from the archives of the British Foreign Office. During this period of trouble with Mexico, the German Press, almost without exception, and especially that part of it controlled by the Government and by the Conservatives or Junkers, was most bitter in its attitude towards America.
These same gun-makers in Berlin tried to persuade the German people that the French were on the point of attacking them. All of this played into the hands of the Junkers by making people all over Europe feel that war could not be avoided. Thus when the Junkers were ready to strike and the great war broke out, people would say, "At last it has come, the war that we knew was inevitable."
So the Junkers, when they made up their minds to wage war for the conquest of France and Russia, persuaded the merchants that after these countries had been conquered they would be forced to give a big sum of money to Germany which would more than pay her back for the full cost of the war.
The German junkers are dodging and lying, they are fighting desperately to keep back everything they possibly can for the bargaining and bullying and table-banging of the council chamber, but that way there is no peace. And when at last Germany says snip sufficiently to the Allies' snap, and the Peace Congress begins, it will almost certainly be as unprecedented as its prelude.
From a political point of view their admission would unquestionably transform the whole parliamentary situation and force the Imperial Government to revise its whole attitude; for the Austrian voters would greatly strengthen the two parties to whose existence Prussia has never become reconciled the Clerical Centre and the Social Democratic Left, while contributing little or nothing to the parties of the Conservative Junkers or the middle-class "Liberals."
In degenerate Prussia even the Junkers have to submit to the presence of petty landowners of lowly birth, or even to peasants of servile origin. Do not historians remind us that even Frederick the Great had to surrender to the claims of the Miller of Sans Souci. In Mecklenburg-Schwerin there is no Miller of Sans Souci to worry the Grand Duke. For no peasant owns one single acre of land.
He gave an account of meetings and conversations, some grave and some gay, with men and women of all classes, and did not forget to speak of his friendly reception at the court of Catharine of Russia. He jestingly related how Frederick the Great had nearly appointed him instructor at a cadet school for Pomeranian junkers a danger from which he had escaped by a precipitous flight.
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.
The Junkers have already taken the fullest advantage of the war to paralyze democracy. If the Labour members do not take a vigorous counter-offensive, and fight every parliamentary trench to the last division, the Labour Movement will be rushed back as precipitately as General von Kluck rushed the Allies back from Namur to the gates of Paris.
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