The Audacious War | Page 7

unified
tariffs, transportation, currency, and monetary systems, Prussia has
been able to point to the war as the cause of the phenomenal prosperity
of Germany.
It is a popular fallacy in Germany that militarism makes the greatness
of a nation. Germany's prosperity did not begin with the war of 1870.
This was only the beginning of German unity which made possible
unified transportation and later unified finances and tariffs. Several
years after the war, France, which had paid an indemnity to Germany
of a thousand million dollars, or five billion francs, was found, to the
astonishment of Bismarck, more prosperous than Germany which had
thus received the expenses of her military campaign and a dot of
Spandau Tower war-reserve moneys.
In 1875 came the great Reichsbank Act, which consolidated all the
banking power of the empire. Then came her scientific tariffs which put
up the bars here, and let them down there, according as Germany
needed export or import trade in any quarter of the earth. The German
people, on a soil poorer than that of France, worked hard and long
hours for small wages. But they worked scientifically and under the
most intelligent protective tariff the world has ever seen. In a
generation they built up a foreign trade surpassing that of the United
States and reaching $4,500,000,000 per annum. By her rate of progress
she was on the way to distance England, whose ports and business were
open to her merchants without even the full English income tax. She
built the biggest passenger steamers ever conceived of and reached for
the freight carrying trade of the world. She mined in coal and iron and
built solidly of brick and stone. She put the world under tribute to her
cheap and scientific chemistry. She dug from great depths the only
potash mines in the world and from half this potash she fertilized her

soil until it laughed with abundant harvests.
The other half she sold outside so that her own potash stood her free
and a profit besides. No nation ever recorded the progress that
Germany made after the inauguration of her bank act and her scientific
tariffs. The government permitted no waste of labor, no disorganization
of industry. Capital and labor could each combine, but there must be no
prolonged strikes, no waste, no loss; they must work harmoniously
together and for the upbuilding of the empire.
Germany did not want war except as means to an end. She wanted the
fruits of her industry. She wanted her people, her trade, and her
commerce to expand over the surface of the earth, but to be still
German and to bring home the fruit of German industry.
Germany has been at war--commercial war--with the whole world now
for a generation, and in this warfare she has triumphed. Her enterprise,
her industry, and her merchants have spread themselves over the
surface of the earth to a degree little realized until her diplomacy again
slipped and the present war followed--such a war as was planned for by
nobody and not expected even by herself. She was giving long credits
and dominating the trade of South America. She had given free trade
England a fright by the stamp, "Made in Germany." She was pushing
forward through Poland into Russia to the extent that her merchants
dominated Warsaw and were spreading out even over the Siberian
railroad. Her finance was intertwined with that of London and Paris.
In the United States she was the greatest loser. Here taxes were lowest
and freedom greatest. German blood flowed in the veins of 20,000,000
Americans and not one fourth of them could she call her own. The
biggest newspaper publisher in America, William Randolph Hearst,
figured that New York was one of the big German cities of the world.
He turned his giant presses to capture the German sentiment. He spent
tens of thousands of dollars upon German cable news, devoting at times
a whole page to cable presentations from Europe which he thought
would interest Germans. But the investment proved fruitless; he found
there was in America no German sentiment such as he had reckoned
upon. He could not increase his circulation, for the German-Americans

seemed little concerned as to what happened in Berlin or Bavaria.
Prussia learned what Hearst learned, that Germans were soon lost in the
United States. She studied this exodus and the wage question and by
various arts and organizations arrested the German emigration to
America. She saw to it that employment at home was more stable. It
was figured that if the German emigration could be centralized under
the German eagle it would be to her advantage. The question was
where to get land that could be made German. Europe has for some
years expected a German dash in Patagonia, and the