Before the War | Page 8

opinion that those who
wanted Germany to remain at peace, quite as much as to be strong, had
at least an excellent chance of keeping their feet. I realized, and had
done so for years past, that it was not merely because of the beaux yeux
of foreign peoples that Germany desired to maintain good relations all
round. She had become fully conscious of a growing superiority in the
application to industry of scientific knowledge and in power to
organize her resources founded on it; and her rulers hoped, and not
without good ground, to succeed by these means in the peaceful
penetration of the world.
I had personally for some time been busy in pressing the then
somewhat coldly received claims for a better system of education,

higher and technical as well as elementary, among my own countrymen,
and had met with some success in asking for the establishment of
teaching universities and of technical colleges, such as the new
Imperial College of Science and Technology at South Kensington. Of
these we had very substantially increased the number during the eight
years which preceded my visit to Berlin; but I had learned from visits
of inspection to Germany that much more remained to be done before
we could secure our commercial and industrial position against the
unhasting but unresting efforts of our formidable competitor.
As to the German people outside official circles and the universities, I
thought of them then what I think of them now. They were very much
like our own people, except in one thing. This was that they were
trained simply to obey, and to carry out whatever they were told by
their rulers. I used, during numerous unofficial tours in Germany, to
wander about incognito, and to smoke and drink beer with the peasants
and the people whenever I could get the chance. What impressed me
was the little part they had in directing their own government, and the
little they knew about what it was doing. There was a general
disposition to accept, as a definition of duty which must not be
questioned, whatever they were told to do by the Vorstand. It is this
habit of mind, dating back to the days of Frederick the Great, with only
occasional and brief interruptions, which has led many people to think
that the German people at large have in them "a double dose of original
sin." Even when their soldiers have been exceptionally brutal in
methods of warfare, I do not think that this is so. The habit of mind
which prevails is that of always looking to the rulers for orders, and the
brutality has been that enjoined--in accordance with its own military
policy of shortening war by making it terrible to the enemy--by the
General Staff of Germany, a body before whose injunctions even the
Emperor, so far as my observation goes, always has bowed.
But I must now return to my formal visit to Berlin in the autumn of
1906. I was, as I have already said, everywhere cordially welcomed,
and at the end the heads of the German Army entertained me at a
dinner in the War Office, at which the War Minister presided, and there
was present, among others, the Chief of the German General Staff.

They were all friendly. I do not think that my impression was wrong
that even the responsible heads of the Army were then looking almost
entirely to "peaceful penetration," with only moral assistance from the
prestige attaching to the possession of great armed forces in reserve.
Our business in the United Kingdom was therefore to see that we were
prepared for perils that might unexpectedly arise out of this policy, and
not less, by developing our educational and industrial organization, to
make ourselves fit to meet the greater likelihood of a coming keen
competition in the peaceful arts.
One thing that seemed to me essential for the preservation of good
relations was that cordial and frequent intercourse between the people
of the two countries should be encouraged and developed. I set myself
in my speeches to avoid all expressions which might be construed as
suggesting a critical attitude on our part, or a failure to recognize the
existence of peaceful ideas among what was then, as I still think, a
large majority of the people of Germany. The attitude of some
newspapers in England, and still more that of the chauvinist minority in
Germany itself, did not render this quite an easy task. But there were
good people in these days in Germany as well as in England, and the
United States might be counted on as likely to co-operate in
discouraging friction.
Meanwhile there was the chance that the course of this policy might be
interrupted by some event which we could not control.