has been secured in the gross by a policy of warlike aggression, and in detail by a system of bureaucratic surveillance and unremitting interference in the private life of subjects.
It goes without saying that there is no secure ground for such a scheme of dynastic usufruct and control except in the loyal support of popular sentiment; and it likewise goes without saying that such a state of popular sentiment can be maintained only by unremitting habituation, discipline sagaciously and relentlessly directed to this end. More particularly must the course of habituation to this end be persistent and unwavering if it is to hold the personal allegiance of a body of subjects exposed to the disintegrating discipline of modern life; where the machine industry constantly enforces the futility of personal force and prerogative in the face of wide-sweeping inanimate agencies and mechanical process, and where the ubiquitous haggling of the price system constantly teaches that every man is his own keeper. It is a matter of common notoriety that all this has been taken care of with unexampled thoroughness and effect under the Prussian rule.21 Chief of the agencies that have kept the submissive allegiance of the German people to the State intact is, of course, successful warfare, seconded by the disciplinary effects of warlike preparation and indoctrination with warlike arrogance and ambitions. The attention deliberately given to these concerns is also a fact of common notoriety; so much so, indeed, that the spokesmen of the system have come to take it for granted as a matter of course, and so are apt to overlook it. The experience of war induces a warlike frame of mind; and the pursuit of war, being an exercise in the following of one’s leader and execution of arbitrary orders, induces an animus of enthusiastic subservience and unquestioning obedience to authority. What is a military organisa-tion in war is a servile organisation in peace. The system is the same, and the popular animus requisite to its successful working is the same in either case. It reaches its best efficiency in either case, in war or peace, only when the habit of arbitrary authority and unquestioning obedience has been so thoroughly ingrained that subservience has become a passionate aspiration with the subject population, where the habit of allegiance has attained that degree of automatism that the subject’s ideal of liberty has come to be permission to obey orders, - somewhat after the fashion in which theologians interpret the freedom of the faithful, whose supreme privilege it is to fulfil all the divine commands. Such an ideal growth of patriotic sentiment appears to have been attained, in a tolerable degree of approximation, in the German case, if one is to credit the popular encomiasts, who explain that “duty,” in the sense indicated, combined with “freedom,” makes up the goal to which the German spirit aspires. “Duty,” of course, comprises the exercise of arbitrary command on the part of the superior as well as the obedience of the inferior, but such arbitrary authority is exercised only in due submission to higher authority, until it traces back to the dynastic head, - who, it would appear, in turn exercises only a delegated authority, vested in his person by divine grace.
The phrase, “dynastic State,” is here used in preference to “patrimonial State,” not because there is any substantial difference between the two conceptions, but rather because the later German spokesmen for the German State, as it is seen at work during the Imperial era, appear to have an aversion to the latter term, which they wish to apply to the territorial State of the pre-Imperial time, in contradistinction to the State as rehabilitated in the adoption of a constitution comprising a modicum of representative institutions and parliamentary forms. The designation “dynastic” is still applicable, however; and in effect the constitutional rehabilitation has not taken the German State out of the category of patrimonial monarchies. The difference resulting from the Imperial constitution is in large part a difference in form and in administrative machinery; it does not greatly circumscribe the effectual powers, rights and discretion of the Imperial crown; still less does it seriously limit the powers of the Prussian crown, or the dynastic claims of suzerainty vested in the Prussian succession. Even under the constitution it is a government resting on the suzerainty of the crown, not on the discretion of a parliamentary body.
It is, in other words, a government of constitutionally mitigated absolutism, not of parliamentary discretion tempered with monarchy.
In the shift from particularism to the Empire no revolutionary move was made, comparable with the change initiated in the United Kingdom by the revolution of 1688; if such a shift to a democratic constitution is to overtake the German State, that move lies still in the future. The changes introduced with the constitution of the Empire, in so far as they have been effectual, were such as were made necessary by the larger scale on which the new national jurisdiction was required to work, and involved only such a modicum of delegated jurisdiction to parliamentary and local organisations as would be expedient for the control and usufruct of territory and resources, population, trade and industry, that exceed the effectual reach of the simpler bureaucracy characteristic of the small territorial State. The economic policy of the Imperial era has still continued to be a “cameralistic” policy, with such concessive adaptations as the modern scale and complexity of economic affairs necessitate. It is true, under the administration of Bismarck there was a perceptible drift in the direction of those “liberal” preconceptions that subconsciously biassed the endeavors of all European statesmen through much of the latter half of the century; but this drift, which showed itself in the Bismarckian policies of trade, colonies, and incipient ministerial responsibility, never came to anything conclusive under his hands; nor had it gone so far as in any appreciable degree to embarrass the endeavors of the later emperor, directed to the complete revendication of the Imperial suzerainty. The paramount authority, under the Imperial constitution, vests in the crown, not in any representative body, although this holds with even less qualification in the Prussian than in the Imperial government; but Germany has, in these respects, been progressively “Prussianised” during the Imperial era, while Prussia has not been drawing toward the lines of that democratic autonomy that holds the rest of north and central Europe, at least on a qualified and provisional tenure.
Imperial Germany does not depart sensibly from the pattern of Prussia under Frederick the Great, in respect of its national policies or the aims and methods of government control, nor do the preconceptions of its statesmen differ at all widely from those prevalent among the dynastic jobbers of that predaceous era of state-making. The difference touches mainly the machinery of politics and administration, and it is mainly of such a character as is dictated by an endeavor to turn the results of modern industry and commerce to account for the purposes that once seemed good to the pragmatists of that earlier era.
That such is the case need give no occasion for dispraise. At least there is nothing of the kind implied here. It may be an untoward state of things, perhaps, though sufficient proof of such a contention has not yet come in sight.
It is specifically called to mind here because it is one of the main factors in the case of Imperial Germany considered as a phase of the development of institutions within the Western culture.
This modern state of the industrial arts that so has led to the rehabilitation of a dynastic State in Germany on a scale exceeding what had been practicable in earlier times, - this technological advance was not made in Germany but was borrowed, directly or at the second remove, from the English-speaking peoples; primarily, and in the last resort almost wholly, from England. What has been insisted on above is that British use and wont in other than the technological respect was not taken over by the German community at the same time. The result being that Germany offers what is by contrast with England an anomaly, in that it shows the working of the modern state of the industrial arts as worked out by the English, but without the characteristic range of institutions and convictions that have grown up among English-speaking peoples concomitantly with the growth of this modern state of the industrial arts.
Germany combines the results of English experience in the development of modern technology with a state of the other arts of life more nearly equivalent to what prevailed in England before the modern industrial régime came on; so that the German people have been enabled to take up the technological heritage of the English without having paid for it in the habits of thought, the use and wont, induced in the English community by the experience involved in achieving it. Modern technology has come to the Germans ready-made, without the cultural consequences
