Germany and the Germans | Page 5

and the particularist. The particularist commune developed from the estate which was self-sufficient, isolated, and independent. When they were associated together it was for special and limited purposes, so that independence might be infringed upon to the least possible extent. The patriarchal commune, on the other hand, proceeded from the communal family which provided everything for everybody. It was a general and compulsory partnership, monopolizing every kind of business that might arise. The particularist group then, and their moral and political descendants now, strive to organize public authority, and public life in such a way, that they are distinctly subordinate to private and individual independence. In the one the Emperor is the father of the family — the Russian Emperor is still called "Little Father" — the independence of each member of the family is swallowed up in the complete authority of the head of the national family; in the other the president, or constitutional king, is the executive servant of independent citizens, to whom he owes as much allegiance as they owe to him.
In Saxony, to-day, more than ninety per cent. of the agricultural population are independent peasant proprietors, and the most admirable and successful agriculturists in the world. It is said indeed that the Curia Regis, which is the Latinized form of the Witenagemote, or assembly of wise men, of the Norman and Angevin kings, is the foundation of the common law of England, and the common law of England is the law of more than half of the civilized world.
Whatever the varieties and distinctions of government anywhere in the world, these two differences are the fundamental and basic differences, upon which all forms of government have been built up and developed.
In the one, everything so far as possible is begun and carried on by individual initiative; in the other the state gradually takes control of all enterprise. The philosophy of the one is based upon the saying: love one another; the political philosophy of the other is based upon the assumption that men are not brethren, but beasts and mechanical toys, who can only be governed by legislation and the police. The ideal of the one is the good Samaritan, the ideal of the other is the tax-collector. The one depends upon the wine and oil of sympathy and human brotherhood; the other claims that the right to an iron bed in a hospital, and the services of a state-paid and indifferent physician, are "refreshing fruit," as though sympathy and consideration, which are what our weaker brethren most need, could be distilled from taxes!
It is claimed for these Teutonic tribes, that those of them which drifted down from the Scandinavian peninsula, are the blood and moral ancestors of the particularist nations now in the ascendant in the world. The love of independent self-government, born of the geographical necessities of the situation, stamped itself upon these people so indelibly, that Englishmen and Americans bear the seal to this day. This change from the patriarchal to the particularist family took place in this German race, and took place not in those who came from the Baltic plain, but in those who came from the Saxon plain.
The tribes from the Baltic plain, the Goths, for example, merely overran the Roman civilization, spread over it; drowned it in superior numbers, and with superior valor; but it was the Germans from the Scandinavian peninsula who conquered Rome, and conquered her not by force alone, but by offering to the world a superior social and political organization. It was to this branch of the German race that Varus lost his legions, at the place where the Ems has its source, at the foot of the Teutoburger Wald. Charlemagne was of these, and his name Karl, or Kerl, or peasant, and the fact that his title is the only one in the world compounded of greatness and the people in equal measure, is the pith of what the Germans brought to leaven the whole political world. He made the common man so great, that the world has consented to his unique and superlative baptismal title of Karl the Great, or Carolus Magnus, or Charlemagne.
The pivotal fact to be remembered is that these German tribes saved Europe by their love of liberty, and by their virility, from the decadence of an orientalized Rome. Rome, and all Rome meant, was not destroyed by these ancestors of ours; on the contrary, they saved what was best worth saving from the decline and fall of Rome, and made out of it with their own vigorous laws a new world, the modern western world. Great Britain, Germany, and the United States are not descended from Egypt, Greece, or Rome, but from "those barbarians who issued from the woods of Germany."
Every school-boy should be taught that Rome died of a