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Professor Treitschke and his successor in the chair of history at Berlin, Professor Delbrück, have been outspoken in their denunciation of England.
He, like Vom Stein, Treitschke, and many others in their time, came to Berlin and established himself there as in the centre of a new national activity. Carl von Clausewitz did in the military world much what Stein did in the civil world. Vom Stein and Clausewitz died in the same year, 1831. In 1834 Heinrich von Treitschke was born.
Such had been the teachings of Treitschke and his disciples long before the Boer War or the Anglo-French Entente. Those events and the Morocco Question in 1905 and 1911 sharpened the rivalry; but it is a superficial reading of events to suppose that Morocco caused the rivalry, which clearly originated in the resolve of the Germans to possess a World-Empire.
'A thing that is wholly a sham, said Treitschke, speaking of the British Empire, 'cannot in this world of ours, endure for ever. Why did this Empire appear to Treitschke to be 'wholly a sham'? Was it not because it did not answer to any definition of the word 'Empire' to be found in German political philosophy; because it did not mean dominion and uniformity, but liberty and variety; because it did not rest upon Force, as, in his view, every firmly established state must do; because it was not governed by a single master, whose edicts all its subjects must obey?
They had no common morality to which one could appeal. One could not appeal in the Name of the Prince of Peace, because to them the Gospel of Peace was immoral. Then the arrogance of their Creed was revolting. This man Bernhardi, and Treitschke, and Nietzsche, and the rest of them lived, and acted on one assumption.
These writers and statesmen were utterly blind to the German peril, though the disciples of Treitschke were already working out a theory about the future destinies of the world, in which neither Great Britain nor Russia nor China counted for very much. There were illusions on both sides of the North Sea, which had to be paid for in blood.
His ideal policy is the policy of the Spartans—“almost miraculous in its perfection.” His ideal man is the pagan hero—the superman of antiquity—Alcibiades, Epaminondas, Alexander, Julius Cæsar. Treitschke, “History of Germany,” Vols.
These claims were called the Greater Ruritania by the cultivated classes who regarded Kipling, Treitschke, and Maurice Barres as one hundred percent Ruritanian. But the grandiose idea aroused no enthusiasm abroad. So holding this finest flower of the Ruritanian genius, as their poet laureate said, to their hearts, Ruritania's statesmen went forth to divide and conquer.
One must read the books of the Napoleonic period to see with what disdain pacificist Germany is referred to that country of peasants, waiters and philosophers. It is sufficient to read the works of German writers, including Treitschke himself, to perceive for what a long period of time the German lands, anxious for peace, have considered France as the country always eager for war and conquest.
On one occasion even Bismarck, the Prussian Junker, expressed a misgiving that a particular law would not be acceptable to the Federal States of the Empire. Emperor William contemptibly dismissed the objection. “Why should the Federal States object when they are only the prolongation of Prussia?” Treitschke, the Saxon, accepts the Prussian theory of Emperor William.
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