rehabilitation of the territorial State as would enable it to do business on the increased scale imposed by the new state of the industrial arts, and adequately to handle the forces which the new industrial system so placed at its disposal.
Much had already been done during the preceding hundred years to take advantage of technological improvements, so far as these improvements contributed directly to the military strength of the prince, and much had been done, incidentally to the extension of territorial control and of fiscal administration, in the way of improved means of communication and intercourse; but the modern industrial system, as such, and except as an outside and essentially alien factor, had not seriously touched the German popu-lation, particularly not those Prussian dominions which take the central place in the rehabilitation of Germany in the nineteenth century. But the industrial state of Germany was after all medićval rather than modern, and the state of the industrial arts, therefore, still continued, on the whole, favorable to the maintenance of the old régime; particularly since this old régime was securely lodged in the interests and traditional ideals of the dynastic rulers and of the privileged classes.
There is a side line of influence from the technological side in the growth of German culture prior to its modernisation, which requires to be noted in any attempt to realise what has taken place in the unfolding of the modern era. The art of printing and the consequent use of printed matter had always been at home among the German people, ever since that technological advance first was made.
From the outset and down into the nineteenth century the printer’s art was a handicraft process, and was well developed in Germany. But the institutional consequences, the effect on use and wont, of the habit of consuming printed matter need not therefore be of the handicraft order. A free consumption of printed matter means a free intercourse of ideas, and it therefore entails an exposure of the consumers to contact with ideas current beyond the circle of their immediate personal contact.
The habitual consumption of print has much the same order of disciplinary effect as habituation to the wide-reaching standardisation of the arts of life brought on by the machine industry; but it goes without saying that the effect so wrought by the use of print will not extend much beyond the class of persons addicted to it; the illiterate, and the classes who make little use of print anyway, will not be seriously or extensively disturbed, - what may be called the extravasation of printed literature is not a matter of large consequence, although it is not to be denied that the diffusion of ideas conveyed by print, among the illiterate, will always amount to something. Whereas the disciplinary value of life under the standardising régime of the machine industry touches the illiterate perhaps more immediately and intimately, and almost as comprehensively, as it touches the classes who habitually read.
It is worth noting in this immediate connection, although it is also a proposition of general validity, that in the nature of the case no profound or massive revolutionary disturbance of the established order, in any respect, can be carried through by the medium of printed matter alone, or in the absence of other, materially more exacting and peremptory, factors of habituation working to the same general effect. So in the case of Germany, although that fraction of the population that was given to reading had long been in contact with the intellectual movement in Europe at large and had, indeed, from time to time, taken effective part in the shaping of current ideas, yet this fraction made up so small a class, was so little in touch with the mass of the population, and held its intellectual convictions on such “academic” tenure - that is to say, so uniformly without reënforcement from its own experience of mechanical fact - that with the best intentions it never succeeded in infecting the people at large with its own ideals of a new order, or in disturbing the incumbents of office in their tenure and usufruct of the old order.18 At the same time printed matter is a highly efficient vehicle for the spread, assimilation and standardisation of habits of thought that are otherwise consonant with the workday exigencies of the arts of life; and then, too, the habit of reading is a nearly indispensable auxiliary of that machine technology that invaded the German community in the nineteenth century, - less so, of course, at that date (middle of the century) than at any later time, but sufficiently so even then to count seriously in the outcome.19 Now, literacy, both in the higher potency of “learning” and in the homelier fashion of ability fluently to read print, was relatively common among the German people at the time when the new era came on; and the movement for improving and extending the means of popular education was already in good practicable shape, so that deficiencies in this respect could be made good as fast as they visibly required a remedy. It used to be one of the stock aspersions on the German community that it was top-heavy with a redundance of learned men. Fault-finding on this score has ceased since the latter part of the century, the learned class having been found useful and the demand for men proficient in the sciences having fully caught up. Meantime the character of this learning, or rather the direction of it, has changed somewhat, the change resulting on the whole in a pronounced shift toward those branches of knowledge that have some technological or commercial value.20
As regards the logical relation between the modern industrial advance and the modernised dynastic State in Germany, it may be held that the makers of this State, the policy of the Hohenzollern dynasty from Frederick the Great to William II, have made use of all available technological improvements to extend the dominion and improve the efficiency of the State; or it may be held, on the other hand, that the technological advance which enforced a larger scale of industry and trade, as well as a larger and more expensive equipment and strategy in the art of war, also drove the dynastic State to reorganisation on a new and enlarged plan, involving an increased differentiation of the administrative machinery and a more detailed and exacting control of the sources of revenue.
Either view appears to be equally true. German students of the case have commonly adopted the former, somewhat to the neglect of what force there is in the latter view. It should be evident that the minuscular territorial State of the high tide of German particularism, with its crepuscular statesmanship, would have no chance of survival under the conditions prevailing in Europe in the nineteenth century. It is equally evident that those dynastic statesmen within this circle of particularism who, either by force of insight or by force of special exigencies and tentative expedients, were led to take advantage of the larger and mechanically more efficient devices of the new age would enjoy a differential advantage as against their conservative neighbors, and would in the end supplant them in the domain of statecraft and presently take over their substance, - the dynastic State being necessarily of a competitive, or rapacious, character, and free to use any expedient that comes to hand. It is a case of selective survival working out through the competitive manoeuvres of those who had the administration of the one and the other policy in hand.
When the state of the industrial arts had so extended the physical reach of civil administration and political strategy as definitively to make a large-scale national organisation practicable, the old order of self-sufficient petty principalities became impossible. This change reached the German territories at a later date than the rest of western Europe, and it did not take effect in a reorganisation of national life until so late a date that the retardation is a matter of surprise in spite of all the explanations offered by the historians.
But in consequence of this retardation the magnitude of the reorganisation, when it came, was also such as to leave the historians somewhat at a loss to account for it without recourse to race characteristics imputed ad hoc as well as to the magical effects of a nepotic predilection on the part of Providence.
By wise management on the part of the dynastic statesmen who have had the direction of policy and the control of the administrative machinery, the rapidly increasing material efficiency of the German community, due to the introduction of the modern state of the industrial arts, has successfully been turned to the use of the State, in a degree not approached elsewhere in western Europe; so that in effect the community stands to the Hohenzollern State somewhat in the relation of a dynastic estate, a quasi-manorial demesne or domain, to be administered for dynastic ends, very much after the fashion of the cameralistic administration of fiscal affairs in the territorial states of Germany a hundred years ago. This subservience of the community
