Volume 1 — Concerning the German Professors

By Frederic Harrison.

To the Editor of the London Morning Post:

Sir: I was not invited to join the reply of our distinguished scholars and professors, perhaps because it is so many years since I was the colleague of James Bryce as Professor of Jurisprudence to the Inns of Court. And, indeed, I do not care to bandy recriminations with these German defenders of the attack on civilization by the whole imperial, military, and bureaucratic order. It seems to me waste of time and loss of self-respect to notice these pedants.

The whole German press and the entire academic class seem to be banded together as an official bureau in order to spread mendacious insults and spiteful slanders. Not a word comes from them to excuse or deny the defiance of public law and the mockery of public faith by the German Emperor, his Ministers, and his armies. These professors seem to exult in serving the new Attila—rather let us say the new Caligula, for Attila at least was an open soldier and did not skulk under the Red Cross behind barbed wire fences.

We have long known that all German academic and scholastic officials are the creatures of the Government, as obedient to orders as any Drill Sergeant. They seem to have sold their consciences for place. Not a word comes from them even of regret for the massacre of civilians on false charges, for the wanton murder of children, for the wholesale rape of women, the showering of bombs upon sleeping towns in sheer cruelty of destruction. The intellectual energies of Kultur seem concentrated on distorting the meaning of our dispatches and the speeches of our statesmen, and in manufacturing for their people and neutrals venomous falsehoods. German Geist today is a huge machine to cram lies upon their own people, and to insinuate lies to the world around. Their system of war is based upon lying at home and abroad, on treachery and terrorism. They think that murdering a few civilians would terrify France into surrender, and will drive England to betray the Allies. Their poor conscripts are told that we kill and torture prisoners; their monuments at home are bedizened with mock laurels; and neutrals are poisoned with wild inventions.

ADOLF VON HARNACK. See Page 198. THEODORE NIEMEYER. See Page 206.

For years past their public men, have been tricking our politicians, journalists, and professors to accept them as peaceful leaders of a higher civilization—- while all the while their soldiers, diplomats, and spies (the three are really but one class) were secretly courting our own royalties and society, studying our naval and military defenses, filling our homes with tens of thousands of reservists having secret orders to spy, to destroy our arsenals and roads, and even planting out bogus industries and laying concrete bases for cannon, to bombard the open towns of friendly nations. We have been living unsuspectingly with a nation of assassins plotting to destroy us. Did these professors of Kultur not know of this elaborate conspiracy of Kaisertum, which unites the stealthy treachery of a Mohawk or a thug to the miracles of modern science? For years past the ideal of Kultur has been to lay down secret mines to destroy their peaceful neighbors. Did these professors of the Fatheland not know this? Then they are unable to grasp the most obvious facts—the life work of their own masters under their own eyes. And, if they did know it, and must at least know it now, and yet approve and glory in it, they must be beneath contempt. Why argue with such hypocrites?

Not a few of us have known and watched this conspiracy for years. I have preached this ever since the advent of Bismarckism and the new Europe that was formed forty years ago. Not a few of us have foretold not only the tremendous attack on the British Empire designed by German sea power but the precise steps of the war upon France, through Belgium, and to be executed by an overwhelming force of sudden shock in the midst of peace. For my part, nothing in this war since July 30 has at all surprised me, unless it be the foul cruelty with which Belgian civilians have been treated. Indeed, in January, 1913, I wrote a warning which reads now like a summary of events that have since happened. I was denounced as a senile alarmist by some who are now the loudest in calling to arms. Alas! too late is their repentance.

May I ask why our eminent academicians and scholars who still profess "friendship and admiration" for their German confrères never even suspected the huge conspiracy of which civilization has been the victim? Why did they accept the stars and crosses of Caligula-Attila? Why hob-nob with the docile creatures of his chancery, and spread at home and abroad the worship of Geist and Kultur? Are they fit to instruct us about politics, public law, and international relations, when they were so egregiously mistaken, so blind, so befooled, with regard to the most portentous catastrophe in the memory of living men? I am glad that they see their blindness now—but why this sentimental friendliness for those who hoodwinked them?

Surely this should open their eyes to the mountains of pretentious clouds on which the claims of Kultur rest. I am myself a student of German learning, and quite aware of the enormous industry, subtlety, and ingenuity of German scholarship. We owe deep gratitude to the older race of the Savignys, Rankes, Mommsens. Since 1851 I have been five times in Germany on different occasions down to 1900. I read and speak the language, and twice I lived in Germany for months together, even in the house of a distinguished man of science. I study their theology, their sociology, economics, history, and their classics. I am quite aware of the supremacy of German scholars in ancient literature, in many branches of science, in the record of the past in art, manners, and civilization. But to have edited a Greek play or to have discovered a new explosive, a new comet, another microbe, does not qualify a savant to dogmatize on international morals and the hegemony of the world. Sixty years ago in Leipzig the editor of a famous journal undertook to prove to me that Shakespeare was a German. Our poet, he said, was the grandest output of the Teutonic mind; nine-tenths of the Teutonic mind was German-argal, Shakespeare was a German, Q.E.D.

With the vast accumulation of solid knowledge of provable facts there is too often in the German mind a sudden bounding up into a cloudland of crude and unproved guesswork. In the logic of Kultur there seems to be a huge gap in the reasoning of the middle terms. A savant unearths a manuscript in Syria, which he deciphers with marvelous industry, learning, and ingenuity. Straightway he cries, "Eureka, behold the original Gospel—the true Gospel!" and he proceeds to turn Christianity upside down. He may have experimented on cultures of microbes for a generation; and then he calls on earth and heaven to acknowledge the mystery of the self-creation of the universe. We hear much of Treitschke today—no doubt a man of genius with a gift for research—but what ferocious pyrotechnics were poured forth by this apostle of mendacious swagger. And as to Nietzsche, he was anticipated by Shakespeare in Timon—a diseased cynic—

henceforth hated be

Of Timon, man and all humanity.

They seem to think that to have put the critics right about a few lines in Sophocles, or to have discovered a new chemical dye, dispenses the German Superman from being bound to humanity, truthfulness, and honor. Charge them with the mutilation of little girls and the violation of nuns in Belgium, and they reply: Yes! but think of Kant and Hegel! It is treason to philosophy, they say, that a man who has translated Schopenhauer should condemn Germans for burning Malines and making captive women a screen for troops in battle. Kultur, it seems, has its own "higher law," which its professors expound to the decadent nations of Europe.

Let us hold no parley with these arrogant sophists. Let all intellectual commerce be suspended until these official professors have unlearned the infernal code of "military necessity" and "world policy" which, to the indignation of the civilized world, they are ordered by the Vicegerent of God at Potsdam to teach to the great Teutonic Super-race. Yours, &c.,

FREDERIC HARRISON.

Bath, Oct. 29.