Is it true that barrack training—the sort of school which the competition of armaments during the last generation has imposed on the people of Continental Europe—makes for moral health? Is it likely that a “perpetual rehearsal for something never likely to come off, and when it comes off is not like the rehearsal,” should be a training for life’s realities? Is it likely that such a process would have the stamp and touch of closeness to real things? Is it likely that the mechanical routine of artificial occupations, artificial crimes, artificial virtues, artificial punishments should form any training for the battle of real life?80 What of the Dreyfus case? What of the abominable scandals that have marked German military life of late years? If peace military training is such a fine school, how could the London Times write thus of France after she had submitted to a generation of a very severe form of it:
A thrill of horror and shame ran through the whole civilized world outside France when the result of the Rennes Court-Martial became known. … By their (the officers’) own admission, whether flung defiantly at the judges, their inferiors, or wrung from them under cross-examination, Dreyfus’s chief accusers were convicted of gross and fraudulent illegalities which, anywhere, would have sufficed, not only to discredit their testimony—had they any serious testimony to offer—but to transfer them speedily from the witness-box to the prisoner’s dock. … Their vaunted honor “rooted in dishonor stood.” … Five judges out of the seven have once more demonstrated the truth of the astounding axiom first propounded during the Zola trial, that “military justice is not as other justice.” … We have no hesitation in saying that the Rennes Court-Martial constitutes in itself the grossest, and, viewed in the light of the surrounding circumstances, the most appalling prostitution of justice which the world has witnessed in modern times. … Flagrantly, deliberately, mercilessly trampled justice underfoot. … The verdict, which is a slap in the face to the public opinion of the civilized world, to the conscience of humanity. … France is henceforth on her trial before history. Arraigned at the bar of a tribunal far higher than that before which Dreyfus stood, it rests with her to show whether she will undo this great wrong and rehabilitate her fair name, or whether she will stand irrevocably condemned and disgraced by allowing it to be consummated. We can less than ever afford to underrate the forces against truth and justice. … Hypnotized by the wild tales perpetually dinned into all credulous ears of an international “syndicate of treason,” conspiring against the honor of the army and the safety of France, the conscience of the French nation has been numbed, and its intelligence atrophied. … Amongst those statesmen who are in touch with the outside world in the Senate and Chamber there must be some that will remind her that nations, no more than individuals, cannot bear the burden of universal scorn and live. … France cannot close her ears to the voice of the civilized world, for that voice is the voice of history.81
And what the Times said then all England was saying, and not only all England, but all America.
And has Germany escaped a like condemnation? We commonly assume that the Dreyfus case could not be duplicated in Germany. But this is not the opinion of very many Germans themselves. Indeed, just before the Dreyfus case reached its crisis, the Kotze scandal—in its way just as grave as the Dreyfus affair, and revealing a moral condition just as serious—prompted the London Times to declare that “certain features of German civilization are such as to make it difficult for Englishmen to understand how the whole State does not collapse from sheer rottenness.” If that could be said of the Kotze affair, what shall be said of the state of things which has been revealed by Maximilien Harden among others?
Need it be said that the writer of these lines does not desire to represent Germans as a whole as more corrupt than their neighbors? But impartial observers are not of opinion, and very many Germans are not of opinion, that there has been either economic, social, or moral advantage to the German people from the victories of 1870 and the state of regimentation which the sequel has imposed. This is surely evidenced by the actual position of affairs in the German Empire, the complex difficulty with which the German people are now struggling, the growing discontent, the growing influence of those elements which are nurtured in discontent, the growth on one side of radical intransigence and on the other of almost feudal autocracy, the failure to effect normally and easily those democratic developments which have been effected in almost every other European State, the danger for the future which such a situation represents, the precariousness of German finance, the relatively small profit which her population as a whole has received from the greatly increased foreign trade—all this, and much more, confirms that view. England has of late seemed to have been affected with the German superstition. With the curious perversity that marks “patriotic” judgments, the whole tendency of the English has been to make comparisons with Germany to the disadvantage of themselves and of other European countries. Yet if Germans themselves are to be believed, much of that superiority which the English see in Germany is as purely nonexistent as the phantom German war-balloon to which the British Press devoted serious columns, to the phantom army corps in Epping Forest, to the phantom stories of arms in London cellars, and to the German spy which English patriots see in every Italian waiter.82
Despite the hypnotism which
