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Updated: June 5, 2025
Liberalism is in the air, but genuine liberals are encompassed with all sorts of difficulties especially in combining their liberalism with the devotion to theocratic robes which the imperialist militarists who rule Japan have so skilfully thrown about the Throne and the Government.
Of old the Puritan in war was certainly the Puritan at his best; it was the Puritan in peace whom no Christian could be expected to stand. Yet those Englishmen to-day who claim descent from the great militarists of 1649 express the utmost horror of militarism. An inversion of an opposite kind has taken place in Germany.
But even granting this paradoxical thesis of the pacifism of German militarists, the situation remains sufficiently contradictory and distracting to the ordinary mind. Every representative German consulted by Monsieur Bourdon proclaims that Germany is pacific, that she wishes for peace, and that she needs peace for her industrial and commercial expansion.
It was there decided that Germany should support to the uttermost whatever claims Austria might think fit to make on Serbia for redress, and she was encouraged to put them so high as either to ensure the domination of the Balkans by the Central Empires through Serbian submission, or to provoke a war by which alone the German militarists thought that German aims could be achieved.
Another little incident is connected with the Chancellor of the University. Although he is not a politician at all, the Militarist party holds him responsible for their recent trials and the student outbreaks. So, although it announced that the Chancellor is coming back, the Anfu Club, the parliamentary organization of the militarists, is still trying to keep him out.
And, of course, the Kaiser is a Junker, though less true-blue than the Crown Prince, and much less autocratic than Sir Edward Grey, who, without consulting us, sends us to war by a word to an ambassador and pledges all our wealth to his foreign allies by a stroke of his pen. *What Is a Militarist?* Now that we know what a Junker is, let us have a look at the Militarists.
From within, there will be, before long, the risk of proletarian revolution. From all these dangers, there is only one escape, and that is a diminution of the birth-rate. But such an idea is not merely abhorrent to the militarists as diminishing the supply of cannon-fodder; it is fundamentally opposed to Japanese religion and morality, of which patriotism and filial piety are the basis.
If we cannot rise to this, and must soil our hands with plunder, at least let us call it plunder, and not profane our language and our souls by giving it fine names. *Our Annihilationists.* Then we shall have the Militarists, who will want to have Germany "bled to the white," dismembered and maimed, so that she may never do it again.
For though in all war and in the heat of battle there are barbarities perpetrated, it argues a strange state of the German national psychology that in this case a heartless severity and destruction of the enemy's life and property should have been preached beforehand, and quite deliberately, by professors and militarists, and accepted, apparently, by the general public.
When the German militarists became excited over the Morocco incident in 1911, a financial panic ensued, credit was withdrawn, pockets were touched, and a great protest arose which did much to quench the jingo spirit. Japan was induced to sign her treaty of peace with Russia because her money was giving out.
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