engendered by continued and consistent suppression, and is the basis of a servile political organisation, such as the territorial State; the latter, if allowed a free course will eventuate in an anarchistic autonomy, such as appears to have been the constitution of Germanic society in the prehistoric ages before the barbarian invasions established a coercive rule in what is now the Fatherland. The latter appears to coincide with the natural bent of these peoples; but the former has that secure hold on their spirit that results from fifteen centuries of submission to a masterful discipline of coercion. The spirit of “duty” in these people is apparently not “nature,” in the sense of native proclivity; but it is “second nature” with the people of the Fatherland, as being the ingrained traditional attitude induced by consistent and protracted experience.
In speaking of these things in the terms current among modern civilised men it is nearly impossible to avoid the appearance of deprecating this servile or submissive attitude of “duty”; particularly will this difficulty beset anyone using the English language, - the fringe of derogatory suggestion carried by the available words and phrases is appreciably less embarrassing, e.g., in German, although even there the commonplace vocabulary lends itself with greater facility to the dispraise of servility and irresponsible rule than to the commendation of these elements of modern patriotism. That such should be the case is doubtless due to the drift of institutional development in western Europe in modern times, which has on the whole set somewhat consistently in the direction of a gradual loosening of the grip of dynastic autocracy. This drift has perhaps not so much created or initiated the growth of an anarchistic (that is to say, non-servile) spirit, but rather has permissively harbored it, and so has allowed the native anarchistic bent of these peoples to reassert itself in a measure, by force of the indefeasible resiliency that characterises all hereditary proclivities.17
Any, even a very cursory, scrutiny of the historical growth of free, or popular, institutions in modern Europe should satisfy all parties in interest that this growth has come about, not because the authorities vested with discretion and power have not taken thought to defeat it wherever a chance has offered, but because the conditioning circumstances have not enabled them to discourage it sufficiently. And by virtue of the close and facile communication of ideas among modern peoples the anarchistic penchant has, by channels of education and neighborly intercourse, come to infect even the subject populations of the better preserved territorial States; so that even there, under the shadow of the masterful system, the current vocabulary shows a weakness for free institutions and the masterless man.
While the exigencies of the language, therefore, almost unavoidably give a color of deprecation to any discussion of this surviving habit of abnegation in the people of the Fatherland, there is no intention here to praise or to blame this spirit of subordination that underlies so much of German culture and German achievement. It is one of the larger factors that have gone to the creation of the modern era in that country, and this era and its “system” will have to count with whatever strength or weakness this animus of feudalism contributes to the outcome. Now, it happens that this surviving feudalistic animus of fealty and subservience has visibly been a source of strength to the German State hitherto; as it presumably also has to the economic system, apart from the political ends to be served by the community’s economic efficiency. This is to be recognised and taken account of quite apart from any question as to the ultimate merits of such a popular temper in any other connection, or even as to its ulterior value for the ends of the State. For all that concerns the present inquiry it may or may not appear, as doubtless would appear to the mind of most English-speaking persons, that this spirit of subservient alacrity on which the Prussian system of administrative efficiency rests is beneath the human dignity of a free man; that it is the spirit of a subject, not of a citizen; that except for dynastic uses it is a defect and a delinquency; and that in the end the exigencies of civilised life will not tolerate such an anachronistic remnant of medićvalism, and the habit of it will be lost. For all that can be made to appear today, it may also be true that it has only a transient value even for the uses of the dynastic State; but all that does not derange the fact that hitherto it has visibly been a source of strength to the German State, and presumably to the German people at large as an economic body.
In the second quarter of the nineteenth century there began a complex movement of readjustment and rehabilitation in German affairs. At least on its face this movement is primarily of an economic character, the immediate provo-cation to practical activity being the needs of trade and of the princely exchequers.
Much genial speculation, of an academic kind, and much edifying popular exposition and agitation of national ideals ran along beside these practical measures, and this intellectual and spiritual disturbance may have had more or less to do with the measures taken and with the general drift of national policy. It is not easy to say whether this spiritual disturbance is to be rated as a cause or a concomitant of the practical changes going forward during this period, but it should seem reasonable to give it place on both of these grounds.
The fashion among historians of the period, particularly among patriotic historians, has been to construe this complex movement of forces, material and immaterial, that makes German history through the middle half of the century, as a movement of the German spirit, initiated by the exuberant national genius of the race. Such is the tradition, but the tradition comes out of the Romantic era; out of which no tradition of a more matter-of-fact character could conceivably come.
A matter-of-fact view of such an historical movement will necessarily look to the factors which may have had a part in shaping habits of thought at the time, and here there are only two lines of derivation to which the analysis can securely run back, - discounting, as is the current fashion, any occult agencies, such as manifest destiny, national genius, Providential guidance, and the like. There is no call to undervalue these occult agencies, of course; but granting that these and their like are the hidden springs, it is also to be called to mind that it is their nature to remain hidden, and that the tangible agencies through which these presumed hidden prime movers work must therefore be sufficient for the work without recourse to the hidden springs; which can have an effect only by force of a magical efficacy. Their relation to the course of events is of the nature of occult or magical efficacy, not of causal efficiency; and under the modern materialistic prejudice in these matters of scientific inquiry, the causal sequence in which an explanation of events is sought must be complete in all elements that touch the motivation and the outcome, without drawing on any but tangible fact, on matters that are of the nature of “data.” To the modern preconception in favor of efficient cause, as contrasted with the Romantic postulate of efficacious guidance, any attempt to set up a logical finality in any terms other than matter-of-fact is quite nugatory. It may be a genial work of futility, and it may have its value as dramatic art or homiletical discourse; but in the house of scientific inquiry such premises, and generalisations in such terms, are but as sounding brass and a tinkling cymbal.
There are two lines of agency visibly at work shaping the habits of thought of the people in the complex movement of readjustment and rehabilitation spoken of above. These are the received scheme of use and wont, and the new state of the industrial arts; and it is not difficult to see that it is the latter that makes for readjustment; nor should it be any more difficult to see that the readjustment is necessarily made under the surveillance of the received scheme of use and wont. The latter is modified in the course of this new range of habituation enforced by the new state of the industrial arts, but the changes taking place in use and wont are, here as elsewhere, made in the way of tardy concession under the impact of exigencies that will tangibly not tolerate usage that has passed out of date.
The complex movement in question is a movement of readjustment in the arts of life to meet the requirements of new technological conditions, and of rehabilitation of the received scheme of princely policy to make it workable under the new technological conditions. The changes which appear in the outcome, therefore, come about on the initiative of the new technological advance, and by expedient concessions and shrewd endeavors on the part of the constituted authority to turn the new-won efficiency to use for its own ends; the conscious directive management in the case being under the hands of the governmental organisation and directed
