Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 48.djvu/846

764 of the German language by foreigners, simply that Germans may enjoy a greater sense of separation from—and doubtless of superiority to—the rest of the world. To the natural abruptness of German manners there has been added, we are told, a decided flavor of aggressiveness which was not characteristic of them before the war. National self-assertiveness has become, the writer states, "a positive cult. It is encouraged," he adds, "by the authorities; it is fostered in the schools; perhaps some day it will form a subject for examination."

The most serious injury, however, has been done to the spirit of liberty. Prosecutions for lese majesty are the order of the day, and the charges on which such prosecutions are based are often of the most trivial kind. Editors accused of this crime for their criticism of the Government or the emperor are "treated in many respects like ordinary felons." They are not allowed out on bail before trial, but are kept in confinement, and at trial are brought up in prison dress. "Any adverse criticism of the Kaiser's utterances is a penal offense. Praise or silence—these are the alternatives." And yet, as Mr. Evans very truly observes, there has never perhaps been a monarch whose speeches more loudly challenged criticism. Such, however, is the price, or part of the price, which the German nation is paying for success in a great aggressive war. It is not only in political matters that the utmost restriction of political liberty prevails. "It is the same in everything. There is little possibility of independence in speech or action. The police are always at your elbow; and woe to you if you do not carry out their injunctions to the letter!" He adds: "To live in Germany always seems to me like a return to the nursery. . . . In fine, generally speaking, the aspect of affairs in modern Germany is by no means exhilarating. It seems to me that it may be summed up in a few words: an enormous increase of power and influence abroad, but at home less comfort, less liberty, less happiness."

It did not fall within the scope of the article from which we have been quoting to refer to any of the political events that have marked the interval between the termination of the Franco-German War and the present time; but an instructive commentary on the spirit which warfare, particularly successful warfare, breeds is afforded by the fact that five years after the close of the war the victorious and all-powerful German nation was only prevented by the peremptory prohibition of the Czar of Russia from falling again, without a shadow of justification, upon its weakened adversary, with the avowed intention of so crushing and maiming it, by further loss of population and territory, as to reduce it definitively to the rank of a second-class power. We have said "without a shadow of justification"; but to the