In turn this inspired the masters and professors in the Gymnasien and Real- Schulen, and these teachers took immediate advantage of the new spirit in the scholars: the standard of the final examination in the Gymnasien-das Abiturienten-Examen, or 'the going-away' examination-was put higher and higher year by year till it reached the limit set by human nature. The level of this examination now is about the level of second-honours in Oxford or Cambridge, far above the graduation standard of American universities.
There are perhaps a thousand such students in Great Britain year by year, against the hundred thousand in German universities, some of whom are going on to further heights.
I don't for a moment mean to suggest that all these hundred thousand German students are the intellectual equals of the thousand honour men of the English universities; they may be on the same level of knowledge, but the best thousand from Oxford and Cambridge are at least as intelligent as the best thousand from German universities. Genius has little or nothing to do with learning; but what I do assert is that the number of cultivated and fairly intelligent men in Germany is ten times larger than it is in England. Many Englishmen are proud of their ignorance: how often have I heard in later life,
'I never could learn languages; French, a beastly tongue to pronounce, I know a few words of, but German is absolutely beyond me: yet I know something of horses and I'm supposed to be pretty useful at banking,' and so forth. I've heard an English millionaire, ennobled for his wealth, boast that he had only two books in his house: one 'the guid book' meaning the Bible that he never opened, and the other his check book.
One scene which will show the enormous difference between the two peoples is bitten into my memory as with vitriol. In order to get special lessons in Old German, I spent a semester in the house of a professor in a Gymnasium; he had a daughter and two sons, the younger, Wilhelm, an excellent scholar, while Heinrich, the elder, was rather dull or slow. The father was a big, powerful man with a great voice and fiercely imperious temper: a sort of Bismarck; he was writing a book on comparative grammar. Night after night, he gave me an hour's lesson; I prepared it carefully not to excite his irritability and soon we became real friends. Duty was his religion, sweetened by love of his daughter, who was preparing to be a teacher. My bedroom was on the second floor in the back; but often, after I had retired and was lying in
bed reading, I heard outbursts of voice from the sitting room downstairs. I soon found out that after my lesson and an hour or two given to his daughter, the professor would go through his lessons with Heinrich. One summer's night I had been reading in my room when I was startled by a terrible row. Without thinking I ran downstairs and into the sitting-room. Mary was trying to comfort her father, who was marching up and down the room with the tears pouring from his eyes: 'To think of that stupid lout being a son of mine; look at him!' Heinrich, with a very red face and tousled hair, sat with his books at the table, sullen and angry: 'Ei with the optative is beyond him,' cried the professor, 'and he's fifteen!'
'Ei with the optative was beyond me at sixteen,' I laughed, hoping to allay the storm. The boy threw me a grateful look, but the father would not be appeased.
'His whole future depends on his work,' he shouted. 'He ought to be in Secunda next year and he hasn't a chance, not a chance!'
'Oh, come,' I said, 'you know you told me once that when Heinrich learned anything, he never forgot it, whereas I forget as easily as I learn; you can't have it both ways.'
'That's what I tell my father,' said Mary, and the storm gradually blew over.
But as the time of the examination approached, similar scenes were of almost nightly occurrence; I've seen the professor working passionately with Heinrich at one and two o'clock in the morning, the whole family on pins and needles because of one boy's slowness of apprehension.
The ordinary German is not by any means a genius, but as a rule he has had to learn a good deal and knows how to learn whatever he wishes; whereas the ordinary Englishman or American is almost inconceivably ignorant, and if he happens to have succeeded in life in spite of his limitations, he is all too apt to take pride in his ignorances. I know Englishmen and women who have spent twenty years in France and know nothing of French beyond a few ordinary phrases. It must be admitted that the Englishman is far worse than the American in this respect; the American is ashamed of ignorance.
In mental things the German is, so to speak, a trained athlete in comparison with an Englishman, and as soon as he comes into competition with him, he is conscious of his superiority and naturally loves to prove and display it. Time and again towards the end of the nineteenth century, English manufacturers grieving over the loss of the South American markets have shown me letters in Spanish and Portuguese written by German 'drummers' that they could not get equalled by any English agents: 'We are beaten by their knowledge,' was the true summing up and plaint. And in the first ten years of the twentieth century the German's pride in his unhoped-for quick success in commerce and industry intensified his efforts, and at the same time his contempt of his easily beaten rivals.
In the spacious days of Elizabeth, Englishmen and Englishwomen too of the best class were eager to learn and prized learning perhaps above its value; the Queen herself knew four or five languages fairly well, better than any English sovereign since. One other fact that an Englishman should always keep before him: the population of Great Britain at the end of the sixteenth century was roughly five millions; at the end of the nineteenth it was some forty-five millions, or nine times as many; yet three-fourths of all the schools today in England for higher education were there in the days of Elizabeth.
That fact and all it involves explains to me the efflorescence of genius in the earlier, greater age: the population has grown nine-fold, the educated class had not doubled its numbers, and certainly has not grown in appreciation or understanding of genius.
I am the more inclined to preach from this text because it suggests the true meaning of the World War, which England has steadily refused to learn.
When from 1900 to 1910 she saw herself overtaken by Germany, not only in the production of steel, but also of iron and coal, England ought to have learned what her contempt of learning and love of sport were costing her, and have put her house in order in the high sense of the word. For a hundred years now she has been sending some of her ablest sons to govern India. She ought to have learned from Machiavelli that every possession of the Romans not colonized by Latins was a source of weakness in time of war. England ought to withdraw from India and Egypt as soon as possible and concentrate all her forces on developing her own colonies, who will always trade with her for sentimental reasons and by compulsion of habit. The Canadian buys six times as much of English goods as the American, and the Australian spends twenty times more on English products than on German, in spite of the superior qualities of the German output. The worst of it is that the English guides and leaders do not even yet grasp the truth.
But at the time the growth of Germany and its eager intellectual life only confirmed me in the belief that by nationalizing the land and socializing the chief industries such as railways, gas and water companies, which are too big for the individual to manage, one could not only lift the mass of the English people to a far higher level, but at the same time intensify their working power. It would surely be wise to double the wages of the workman when you could thereby increase the productivity of his labour. Moreover the nationalization of the railways, gas, water and mining companies would give five millions of men and women steady and secure employment and sufficient wages to ensure decent conditions of life; five millions of workmen more could be employed on the land in life-leases, and in this way Great Britain might be made self-supporting and her power and wealth enormously increased.
I tell all this because I resolved to make myself a social reformer and began to practice extempore speaking for at least half an hour daily.
From Goettingen after three semesters I went to Berlin; it was tune; I needed the stimulus of the theatre and galleries of art and the pulsing life of a great city. But there was something provincial in Berlin; I called it a Welt-dorf, a world-village; yet I learned a good deal there: I heard Bismarck speak several times and carried away deathless memories of him as an authentic great man. In fact, I came to see that if he had not been born a Junker in a privileged position and had not become a corps-student to boot, he might have been as great a social reformer as Carlyle himself. As it was, he made Germany almost a model state. He was accused in the Reichstag one day by a socialist of having learned a good deal from Lassalle; he stalked forth at once and annihilated his critic by declaring that he would think very little of anyone who had had the privilege of knowing that extraordinary man and had not learned from him. It was Bismarck, I believe, who was responsible for the first steps towards socializing German industries; Bismarck who established the land-banks to lend money on reasonable terms to the farmers; Bismarck too who dared first to nationalize some German railways and municipalize gas and water companies; and provide for the extension by the state of the canal system.
