Germany and the Germans | Page 5

laws, no man knows. The imaginative
historian pushes his way through the mists, and sees that the tribes who
lived in the Scandinavian peninsula were forced by their cramped
territory to become fishermen and sailors, and cultivators of small areas
of land, accustomed therefore to rule themselves in small groups, and
hence independent and markedly individualist. Such historians divide
even these rude tribes sharply between the patriarchal 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