Political Problems of Europe
As They Interest Americans
By Frank A. Vanderlip
First Paper
UR interest in European affairs has been undergoing marked change in the last generation—even in the last half dozen years. We do not need to look back far to remember the time when we had little concern in world politics. Questions of European public policy, the tendencies of political currents, and the objects of national ambitions, were without practical interest to the average American. Even European war meant in our minds only that we were to sell more wheat and provisions, and we looked with greater interest at market quotations than we did at the questions which might involve nations in conflict. We were not only outside the range of the game of European diplomacy, but we lacked reason for having a keen practical interest in European social and industrial conditions.
We were concerned with Europe’s general prosperity, for Europe bought our produce; but the training, efficiency, and organization of European labor, the effect upon industrial progress of current legislation and of sociological tendencies, all had more of an academic than a practical interest for us. Important as was our foreign trade, four-fifths of our exports were the direct products of the farms, ranches, and forests. Our fields could fear no rivalry, and our workshops had not begun to challenge competition.
With the military and industrial successes of the last half dozen years, however, have come many and far-reaching changes. Not only is our present interest in world politics, in its relation both to our own political system and to our national ambitions, a matter of recent growth, but we have another quite immediate interest in the political conditions and development of other nations—an interest that leads us to measure the effect of national conditions and development on the efficiency of industrial and commercial competitors.
Now that we have taken our place in the first rank as a manufacturing nation and can see an inevitable destiny leading us toward world industrial competition, all the questions affecting the relative efficiency of the other great industrial countries in competition with us in the world markets become of practical importance to every American. The farm boy, the shop apprentice, the clerk, the worker in every field of American life, must henceforth have a more and more intimate personal relation to European conditions, problems, and tendencies. That is true because the conditions that are affecting our great industrial competitors, the problems with which they are concerned, the difficulties which they are encountering, the successes which give them fresh courage, will all have an increasing influence upon the net results of the day’s work of the average American.
For these reasons I believe that we are ready to give a more intelligent study to European conditions, and that it will be practically worth our while to gain a clearer comprehension of the political life of other nations, and of their social and industrial problems and the efforts directed toward their solution. I believe that we are coming to recognize that we need something more than the bare facts regarding important events. We need to comprehend underlying causes. We need to understand more of the perspective and the significance of foreign events in their relation to our own affairs. It is important, too, that we not only keep abreast of those events which constitute live news in the mind of the cable editor, but that we should understand those social and industrial conditions, those currents of public thought, those national and racial attitudes which have now all come to form subjects of distinct practical interest to us, because they are matters directly related to our pocket-books, matters with which our material prosperity must henceforth have definite concern.
I am profoundly impressed with the importance of the awakening interest in European affairs and of the value of the clear observation of these affairs through the eyes of practical American business men. The more rapidly we lose some of our self-complacence and come to recognize that while there are many things that we do better than other people, there are many other things that we do worse, the sounder will be our understanding, both of our own resources and the strength of our competitors in the international industrial development.
In the old days, when a man had passed through his apprenticeship in some trade, his ambition impelled him to travel from one centre to another and observe the art and learn the methods that were practised wherever his trade had gained pre-eminence; and after this travel and observation he was proud to call himself a “journeyman workman.” That is the German custom to-day, and there we find not only journeymen craftsmen, but journeymen manufacturers, merchants, and bankers—men who are observing with intelligence and minute care the methods and practices of their international competitors. Just such observation is healthful for us. While it will cause the American journeyman to lose much of his Yankee complacency, it will in the end give him the firmest foundation upon which to rest his national pride and hopes for the national future. It is merely as a “journeyman” business man that I shall try to write of some of the European conditions which have come under my observation, and which seem to me of practical interest to other Americans.
In a survey of Europe which seeks to examine the qualities of nations as industrial competitors, present and prospective, the fundamental consideration must be the stability of governments. Political stability is an absolute prerequisite to industrial prosperity. Where the energies of a people are constantly diverted to the settlement of political questions, the advance of commerce and industry is greatly hindered. Stability of conditions is the foundation on which great commerce is built. A period of stability in our own political conditions is always recognized as most favorable to business development. The possibility of a change in money standard or in customs tariff unsettles every branch of commerce. The political stability of our industrial rivals is a consideration of the most practical importance to everyone concerned in our commercial life, and in any analysis of the strength of our competitors that is the first phase of the subject to investigate. Is industrial development in Europe to go forward under about the some political conditions as now exist, or do the growing expenditures and increasing debts, the weight of military organization and of naval requirements, the growth of socialism and the unsettling of established conditions, all combine to endanger the European political fabric and threaten essential modifications of government which will affect the whole commercial and industrial life? Is the map of Europe drawn in indelible colors? Will the development of commerce and industry proceed with as much protection and aid from the government and with no more obstacles and disabilities than now? Are the dangers of wars imminent? Are the economies of peace secure? Answers to these questions must all have immense influence on the future of our industrial competitors.
Since the impetus which the Czar gave to the arbitration movement through the Hague Conference there has been much progress—progress that has been recently emphasized by the conclusion of treaties between England and France, France and Italy, Sweden and Denmark, and which may even record the striking achievement of an arbitration treaty between France and Germany. These treaties, however, are little more than expressions of national good-will.
It is in France that the arbitration movement has shown the greatest vitality. The well-directed efforts of the Baron d’Estournelles de Constant have been largely responsible for this. He has, within a few months, built up a group of more than one hundred deputies who, while still affiliating with various other groups in the Chamber, form a tolerably compact organization in favor of international arbitration. The expenses of militarism, the increasing budgets, the growing difficulties in the effort to make taxation equal government requirements, the constant and enormous additions to the permanent national debts, all spell ruin for the great powers of Europe in the mind of the Baron de Constant. He is most pessimistic in regard to the financial future of the nations of Europe if military expenditures are to keep up to their present scale.
The Baron de Constant impressed me as a man of tremendous earnestness. The strength of his belief in his own pessimistic picture of the future of Europe, unless the tendency toward increasing armament and ever-growing expenditures is checked, undoubtedly has given him great influence, not only in the French Chamber, but with the political leaders of other nations as well. When he talked to me of the financial ruin which he saw ahead, and of the certainty of war which must result by the time the growing strain of militarism reached the inevitable breaking point, he impressed me, not alone with his earnestness, but with the force of his reasoning and the gravity of the peril which he sees. It is not surprising, in view of the budget and balance sheet of France, that a Frenchman sees this peril with special distinctness. The success which the Baron de Constant has met with in bringing together a working group in the French Chamber and in successfully completing a treaty with England is great enough to entitle him to high credit as a statesman. For many years there has been in France a most intense national prejudice against England—prejudice that has frequently descended to scurrilous abuse, and it is certainly remarkable to find so marked a reversal of public sentiment in the few months which have intervened between notable exhibitions of that prejudice and the recent acclaim over the completion of an arbitration treaty and the establishment of a cordial international feeling.
While great credit is due to the Baron de Constant for his efforts in giving practical form to this change in national feeling, the really potent influence was that of King Edward himself. When he planned a royal visit to the French capital, it was in the face of abusive criticism of England over the Boer war. His courtesy, tact, and good-humor produced a remarkable effect on the national temper of France. The return visit of President Loubet and the heartiness of the greeting which London gave him—a greeting more hearty, it was said, than he had ever received in Paris—was all that seemed needed to win the volatile French affections, and suddenly the whole race of journalists began to discover reasons for most brotherly cordiality between Frenchmen and Englishmen. All this worked in happily with the arbitration movement in the Chamber. There followed a visit of the arbitration group to London as the guests of Parliament, and a return visit of Parliamentary members as the guests of the French Chamber, and from this interchange of courtesies have resulted real understandings and sympathies such as have been markedly lacking before in the international relations between those two great powers.
The effect of royal visits, the great diplomatic significance that attaches to them, and the genuine influence which they have in shaping the public opinion of entire nations, are among the aspects that strike an American observer as peculiarly interesting in European politics. Within the last few months in addition to the interchange of courtesies between the King of England and the President of France, there have been important visits by the Italian King to France and Germany, one of which had almost as marked effect in producing cordial national feeling between two nations as had King Edward’s visit. Another royal visit that was planned, that of the Czar to Rome, was interfered with for some reason, and European journalists wrote endless columns of speculation in regard to the reasons for the change of royal plans.
The arbitration movement is undoubtedly gaining force; and still, at best, it is but binding warriors with threads. No one for a moment believes that any number of arbitration agreements or Hague Tribunals would hold in check a military movement when ruler or people were once aroused. Without doubt such agreements may do much to harmonize international prejudice and may be of great use in preventing friction over small differences—friction which sometimes grows into animosities demanding national bloodshed. Their usefulness is acknowledged by most of the statesmen of Europe, but no nation shows any inclination toward abating one jot of its military programme.
Increasing armament, larger armies, more expensive defences and more thorough preparation is the order of the day everywhere in Europe. In conversation with public men and with many commercial and industrial leaders, I have never heard the opinion ventured that the leading powers of Europe are likely in the near future to disarm, or, indeed, materially to reduce their military expenditures. The German Socialists, it is true, make the reduction of such expenditures one of the principal planks of their platform, but in the same speech in which Herr Bebel arraigns the Government for excessive military expenditures, he castigates it for doing nothing to check the aggressive policy of Russia. There is plenty of grumbling over the taxes which support these vast armaments of Europe, but there is no deep-seated conviction in the minds of any considerable portion of the people of any of the great powers that their own nation should set the example of a reduction of military and naval strength. Few things in Europe can be predicted with more certainty than that the outlay for defence and for aggressive strength will continue.
The bankruptcy of Europe, which such men as the Baron de Constant see, is perfectly easy of demonstration by any amateur statistician, who needs only a series of budgets and a short lead-pencil thoroughly to demonstrate such a conclusion; but so easily reached a conclusion might be wrong. I believe that it would be. It is true that the cost of the military establishment, the vast expenditures in constructing navies, the constantly recurring budget deficits, the terrible weight of taxation, are all real and painfully evident facts. France is the natural place to look for these pessimistic opinions in regard to the future of the great powers, for France has a debt incomparably the greatest in the world, and a debt that seems ever growing. To-day it stands roundly at $6,500,000,000, a debt so great that every voter in France—and there is universal manhood suffrage there—every voter in France has a share of responsibility for the national debt equal to $844. It is small wonder that this vast debt should give rise to apprehension. Only the unparalleled thrift of her own people has enabled France to market the tremendous blocks of rentes which have been the legacies left her by one finance minister after another. During the years of peace the succession of budget deficits have made almost as great increases in the debt of France as had formerly been piled up by the misfortunes of war. So it is easy to see how a Frenchman, with mind imbued with the great military expenditures and growing debt of his own country, should look out over Europe and note the cost of the great armies and see the stream of taxes that runs into the sea that navies may float there—sees everywhere a tendency toward increasing government expenditures and threatening deficits and nowhere means of escape through taxation, because taxation is already perilously high; it is no wonder that such an observer sees in the constant increase of government obligations an ultimate financial collapse and political disintegration of a character which might readily disturb the balance of power in a way no army could check nor treaty stay.
In spite of all that there is to sustain such pessimistic views, I am certain that the men most powerful in shaping the affairs of Europe do not see, at least in anything like the immediate future, any reason to believe that in Western or Central Europe there are to be radical political upheavals, sweeping social changes, or the financial break-down of governments. The exception is the near East, the Balkan firebrand, where there are irreconcilable differences and implacable racial antagonisms, seething under impossibly bad government, and where, sooner or later—where, indeed, both sooner and later
Typical French politicians.
Nationalist deputies and aldermen making their annual manifestation before the statue of Strasburg on the Place de la Concorde.
for no single war can settle those vexed questions—there may be seen the fall of old governments and the upbuilding of new, the end of dynasties and the creation of new national combinations. In the near East there is always imminent a catastrophe which might involve all Europe in conflict.
I am by no means rash enough to venture opinions of my own in regard to the political future of Europe. The question is too complicated, the undercurrents too many and too important, for the casual observer to reach more than a superficial conclusion. I have been fortunate, however, in meeting men of great importance in both the business life and Government councils of most of the capitals, and the impression which I have of Europe’s political future is the composite of interviews with men whose opinions are worth attention. The impression which these conversations has left is one of political stability, one which leads to a strong belief in the unlikelihood of immediate radical changes. There may be socialistic triumphs, there may he growing parties with programmes of revolt against the existing form of government, there may be burdensome taxation and great military expenditures; and still; if one takes up one nation after another and analyzes its position in relation to the whole fabric of European politics, the practical man will, I believe, conclude that Europe is likely to go on for a great many years very much as it has been going on for a good many years past.
Take the situation in revolutionary France, the country that has had more experience in constitution making than all others in Europe. France is to-day really one of the most stable of European governments. There is small likelihood of France becoming involved in any war, and the reason for that does not lie in this great wave of popular approval of arbitration which is just now such a manifest feature of French politics, but lies much deeper. France has no serious ambitions for an increase of European territory. Alsace-Lorraine is a poignant regret, but not a military ambition. Perhaps the one dominant characteristic of the French nation as a whole is its penurious thrift; and every holder of F. 100 rentes is an advocate of peace because the economy of peace appeals to his pockets.
But the real reason why France may today be set down as among the most pacific of nations lies in this foot France is not so much a republic, not so much a government administered Hy the voice of the people, as it is an oligarchy. The Government of France is really a government by a political dynasty, by a group of men and their political heirs, who have made a business of governing France, and, having left to them the centralized instrument of the 
Monks of the Capuchin order greeted by their friends after being fined by the Conventional tribunal for refusing to give up life in common. Napoleonic system, have governed France,
not particularly as a majority vote of the nation might have dictated, but as they have best seen fit-with some patriotism for France, and with much regard for their own place, power, and perquisites. This political dynasty has no disposition to risk anything on war, for war would mean
one of two things. If it ended in defeat, it would mean that the French nation would rise up, as it always has risen when its sensibilities were really smitten, and the whole dynasty would be irrevocably tumbled out of office, to say nothing of the prospect of upsetting the form of government itself. But a military victory to France would have in it quite as distressing possibilities for her political dynasty as would a military defeat; for a military victory would mean a military hero, and France can never be trusted not to lose her heart to a military hero. So sharply is this always in the mind of the Government that when the nations had a bit of police work to do at Pekin, and under hardly any conceivable development could thereby garner many military laurels, the man who, by every right of precedence, position, and ability, should have gone in to the far East at the head of the French troops was kept at home, and a man was selected with abilities of a type that left no fear in the mind of the Government about his ever becoming a military idol.
France may give us occasional exhibitions of political turmoil. It is not improbable that the socialistic sentiment in France will continue to grow, and that there will he some evolutionary changes in government; but I believe that the solidity of the republic may be set down as one of the practical certainties of European politics, and that so far as the future of France, as a world-industrial competitor is concerned, we may count upon her industries being developed without serious interference from any political change.
If we turn to Germany we find there on the face of things much that might indicate impending radical political change. There is certainly political progress there—progress toward individual liberty and political equality, progress toward really representative government. If one were to try to put into a single phrase the significance of the political currents and tendencies, the real essence of the vital political life of Germany, it could well be said that it is to write “truth” into the constitution. Germany’s constitution contains many fair-sounding provisions for liberty and equality, but it has not, in fact, furnished either liberty or equality to the humble German citizen. The constitution says that every man shall have equal justice, that every man shall be eligible to public office, and that there shall he fairness of franchise and of voting representation. In the practical operation of government none of those guarantees is fully kept.
The political life of Germany probably has a more direct practical interest for the American citizen than does that of any other Continental nation, for many of their political questions and their legislative problems directly concern us. That is true because of the barriers they are putting up against our exports of food products, and because of the work which the Government is doing in education and in legislation affecting social conditions—legislation that 
The Sister Superior protesting at the door of the parochial school Rue Bacon against her expulsion.has most pronounced effect upon the efficiency of industrial competition.
There is an “irrepressible conflict” in the development of German national life. Germany is endeavoring at the same moment to be a great agricultural nation and a great industrial nation. Agriculture must wrest whatever it may of success from a stubborn, parsimonious soil; industry finds itself in a country barren of natural resources and lacking cheap raw material.
It is only within a generation that Germany's industrial ambitions have become internationally important; but within that generation almost all of the vital currents of German development have been flowing in the direction of industrialism. Industry has gained on agriculture, until to-day the national economic life is about equally divided between the two. The great progress of industry has seemed to the agricultural half of the nation to work great hardship to it, while the present hopes and ambitions of the industrial half seem to the agrarians only to be the planning for them of still greater hardships.
The landlord sees in manufacturing and commerce an unfair competitor for labor. The factory entices the laborer from his fields. Railroads and steamships, the landlord thinks, are a malicious innovation, because they bring the fields of Argentina and America into sharp competition with his own sterile acres. His only hope has been in keeping out of Germany the products of other agricultural countries and by gaining from the Government higher and higher protection for his own products.
The landlord's antagonisms and complaints are by no means without foundation. He has certainly fallen on evil days. The march of events has made more and more difficult his financial position. While he has succeeded in laving enormous taxes on the foodstuffs of the German working man, he has not freed himself from the difficulties of almost impossible competition. Livery comparison which he makes with his former position and influence adds to his bitterness against the new industrial régime.
On the one side he finds himself pressed by what he regards as upstart socialistic doctrines and insistent demands for broader political rights, and even worse than that, the ever-reiterated demand for what seems to him ruinously cheap food. On the other hand, his long-established influence in affairs is assailed by a new aristocracy of wealth. When one remembers the historical position of the landed class, the landlord’s view is not unnatural. All through German history the junkers have officered the army and led it to its fields of victory; they have supplied the statesmen and furnished the class that has ruled the country. It is small wonder that they feel bitter antagonism toward this industrial development. This new industry has successfully competed with the meagre wage the landowner was able to offer to the farm hand. Bleak cottages are left empty, and fields are robbed of labor. The landlords late servants, over whom he ruled almost as ruled his feudal ancestors, have not only left his acres, but in the cities they have organized themselves into a political power and shout “bread usurer™ at him, and in their determined demands for cheap food, keep up a constant warfare 
School boys walking with a priest.upon that protective tariff that is the only barrier the junker has left between his land and financial ruin.
All that is bad enough; but when this same industrialism which has touched the aristocrat in his purse wounds him also in his pride, when it builds up a new aristocracy, a new ruling class with strength and position measured by wealth, and begins successfully to assail the junker’s immemorial influence in national affairs, the bitterness of his position, with his traditions of fortune and power thus being undermined, is not hard to understand.
So Germany has, in the irreconcilable differences between agriculture and industry, an “irrepressible conflict™: On the one hand a landed aristocracy lone used to political power—a power whose roots run back to feudal tradition, but whose very daily life is now hampered and made difficult by depression in agriculture; while opposed to this aristocracy of birth is a flauntingly prosperous industrialism, with its rebellion against class, its demand for the curtailment of the privileges of the nobles, its appeal for broader political rights, and more secure individual liberty. The struggle which will go on between these irreconcilable elements of the German nation must have in it constant interest for us, and an interest that is not merely academic, for the progress of the conflict will have intimate relation to our position In international trade.
When one gets even slightly below the surface in a study of political conditions in Germany, he cannot fail to be surprised that so little has been accomplished in the direction of political equality and freedom. The junker’s influence has its roots in centuries of prerogative. In a generation Germany has become a great power, political and economic, but in that time there has been no material internal advance in the direction of freedom. Constitutional Government is a semblance and a pretence, not a reality. The Reichstag at first had little enough influence in shaping legislation, compelled as it was to work with a ministry in nowise responsible to it and dependent for its life only on royal favor: but instead of gaining for itself that decisive power which the popular house should have in a really representative government, its actual authority has substantially diminished. It has relinquished much of its control over expenditures, and has also limited its power over income by agreeing to an arrangement for a rigid and intricate system of taxation which in its detail has no flexibility even to the wishes of the majority.
Germany is governed by a bureaucracy, and in many ways better governed than any other nation in the world. Popular representation has little existence, and the voice
The police surrounding a parochial school in the Ternes quarter preparatory to turning out the occupants.
of the people small influence. Without a doubt the German governmental organization is the best bureaucracy, the most scrupulously honest, and, within its lights, the most painstaking and hard-working, that any government has trained to its aid; but the results are not popular government. The seeds of a desire for popular government were long ago sown in Germany, It is an expression of that desire, it is the political determination of the common people to write “truth” into the constitution, that gave the Social Democratic party in the last election three million votes—just under a third of the total. But the tremendous growth and the sweeping victories of that party are not to be taken as showing a disposition on the part of the German voter violently to overthrow existing conditions. They are critical of the growing expenditures of the Government, particularly for the navy, and they resent the injustice of the arrangement of the constituencies under which there is the greatest inequality of representation in the Reichstag. They are a party of protest against many existing conditions, but they do not threaten the permanency of Government; and as they are sobered by increasing power and responsibility, their programme becomes in the main one which the average American voter would regard as an enunciation of fundamental principles of political equality and good government.
The point of view of the Social Democrats is mainly economic. They believe that the present economic development—a development nowhere better illustrated than in Germany—makes necessary new political conditions. They see in that development influences leading inevitably to the greater and greater substitution of machinery for hand employment, to the stifling of small industries by great combinations. They believe that it has a tendency to place the means of production within the exclusive control of a comparatively small number of people, and they hold that this small group has monopolized more than its share of those advantages brought about by the increase in productive capacity. They are thus led to believe that this whole economic development makes necessary a revision of settled convictions both in regard to capital and the influence of the state on economic life. They hold in general that the authority of capital must be narrowed, while the limits and rights of the state to exercise control in economic affairs must be enlarged. So much for their strictly socialistic doctorines. They have come to be notably mild and there has been eliminated so much of what was the old school of collective socialism that the party seems hardly entitled to the name of Socialist.
The great wave of Socialism which has swept over Germany is really only a wave of liberalism: the foundations of the Government are in nowise shaken by it. Most of the demands which the triumphant Socialist party make are of a character which will tend toward increased industrial efficiency should the Socialist go on toward even greater
The Church of the Carmelite Monks in Paris closed by the police. success.
Germany, then. I believe, is a field which we should watch with the most intense interest for the evolution in political life which is sure to come, but that evolution has in it only promise of stronger and better government, and no sign of anything that threatens the Government’s permanence. There is much which we might well envy in the practical accomplishments of the German Government in the aid it gives to industry and the effect it has on commercial life: in the thoroughness and honesty of administration, and in the substantial benefits received by every citizen. Whatever there is of evolutionary change in the future promises more, not less, efficient aid to industry. Whatever modifications are worked out in the national life—and there may be many—promise to result in giving Germany better government, and in furnishing a more secure foundation for the upbuilding of her industrial life, developing her as a competitor and strengthening her as a rival.
Beyond all question America’s greatest industrial competitor is Germany: the development in political life there promises no reactionary tendency in respect to industrial efficiency. Great as Germany is today as an industrial competitor, the coming years will make her greater.
Although we may find in France and Germany a preponderance of reasons pointing to political stability, what of Austria-Hungary? Is the political life of the dual monarchy near its end? Is there to be dismemberment, with all the endless consequences to European politics which a partitioning of the empire would engender? Any amount of support can be found for the most pessimistic views In regard to Austria’s political future. Statesmen and journalists have not hesitated to write most frankly of their belief that great changes are impending there. Diplomats of experience may be found who hold the opinion that the funeral bells of Franz Joseph will ring down the curtain on the last act of the Hapsburg sway, and that will be true in spite of the age of the empire, the strength of tradition, and the convulsion which the whole political fabric of Europe will undergo.
Certain it is that Austria-Hungary in its potentiality for political change is the most interesting country in Europe. The empire, with its peculiar duality of emperor and king, its two capitals, its triple ministry, its six chambers, its eighteen parliaments, and its dozen nationalities, offers a conglomeration of political ideas and ideals of racial antagonism and of parliamentary inconsistencies which have strained to the utmost the diplomacy of the beloved monarch. Franz Joseph has in many ways ideally managed the difficulties of his position. Without great strength, with his 
Socialists hooting Catholics who are displaying the motto “Liberté” as a protest against the expulsion of orders.whole political creed a belief in compromise which should not give up the essentials of power, and in diplomacy which should play off one warring element against another, and leave the throne unharmed, he has found success beset by many difficulties. Had he not possessed a personality which has strongly attached to him the great
majority of his turbulent subjects, it is hard
to see how he could have succeeded at all.
The average American hardly appreciates the political significance of the Empire of Austria-Hungary, nor the vast importance of the situation there to the future of Europe. Government there is more a display of hysterical sentiment than a political organization for national, industrial, and commercial advancement. It is not easy for us, with our assimilative power of turning all nationalities into Americans, to comprehend the intensities of the racial antagonisms of Europe. Nowhere do these antagonisms find freer play than in Austria-Hungary. The Poles and Bohemians retain memories of a past political greatness. The Magyars have as keen a pride of race as any living people. Every one of the dozen nationalities of the empire has racial ambitions of its own, an almost fanatical determination to exalt this language or that, and a total disregard for the general welfare in the struggle of many tongues and various racial ideals.
It seems absolutely hopeless to expect that the Austria-Hungarian Empire will eventually constitute itself into a confederacy after the German model—compact, homogeneous, centralized. If one looks for such agreement as affording the only political bands that can permanently bind Austria together, it is easy to conclude that dissolution, dismemberment, and partitioning must be written into her future, or to believe, as some do, that the future of the dual empire can be compassed in a sentence—that it is to be a new Balkan with a dozen little nations all at war, and in their racial prejudices that touch of fanaticism which will make them irreconcilable enemies. There are numberless reasons which can be brought forward pointing to the end of the Hapsburg reign; but unpromising and complicated as the situation is, there is one impressive reason stronger than all those that point to dissolution, one reason why the empire will go on even after Franz Joseph's death and the coming of a far less politic ruler: No European nation is anxious for Austria’s territory.
In spite of all the ambition with which Germany is credited, the weight of opinion in Germany is unfavorable to any extension of territory at Austria’s expense. There are reasons enough apparent why Hungary, with its racial prejudices, its own national ambition, and the certainty of its forming a new Reichstag party, should not be brought into the empire. There are reasons almost as potent why the German provinces of Austria would not be welcome. It is true those provinces are thoroughly German in language, sentiment, thought and aspiration. Their folk songs and poetry are full of longing for union with the Fatherland, but there is no sentiment among the influential people of Germany which would tend toward taking these provinces into the empire, bringing, as they would, a great
A clerical detachment in Brittany awaiting the eviction agent of government—their clubs are hidden nearby.
addition to the strength of the Clerical party, and laying on the Government responsibility and difficulties out of proportion to anything that would be gained. Russia has quite problem enough with her Poles, without wanting to reunite, bu an absorption of Austrian territory, two parts of once partitioned and always unhappy Poland, and thus give new life to that national feeling which it has cost so much to subdue. The desire for a partitioning of Austria does not exist with the governments of the other great powers; but violent as are the internal dissensions, most of these differences will be temporarily harmonized before the danger of any development that looks like a recoloring of the map and an absorption into the stronger nationality of Teuton or Slav.
A vast force is wasted in the Austrian Empire by racial antagonism and parliamentary strife. Industry and commerce are kept humbly waiting while parliamentary mobs shriek in a babel of uncomprehended tongues. The whole economic life and development is hampered, and there is little reason to hope for better things. But there is even less reason, I believe, to expect that the political bands which hold these warring elements into an empire will be broken, and that there will be liberated in the very centre of the European balance of power a dozen independent nationalities to make a convulsion that would be as terrible perhaps as the events following the French Revolution.
An ambassador at St. Petersburg, who had had experience in many European courts, once said to me:
“I cannot put too strongly my belief in the solidity of the Government of Russia. Considering its vastness it is the most perfect going machine in existence. I have known Russia many years, and I believe the Government grows stronger rather than less secure. The Government is in the awkward position of having to solve the double problem of advancing and standing still. It desires to advance industrially and commercially, but it must stand still as an autocracy. For it to thus stand still there cannot be too much education. The strongest influences in the empire to-day are on the side of the Government, and those factors are always growing stronger. There will some day, of course, be political advancement; but anyone who believes that the occasional plots and disturbances that get to the surface here point to any real danger to the foundations of Government has but a superficial knowledge.”
This view may not be generally agreed to in the light of developments in connection with the Japanese war. I know that there are observers of Russian conditions, whose opinion is well worthy of attention, who believe that Russia is on the point of a great political upheaval. The weakness of the Czar, the corruption of the bureaucracy, the inefficiency of government which has at some points been disclosed by the events in the far East, lead them to believe that a political awakening is near, that possibly the great territory to the east of Little Russia, which has been filled by adventurous exiles and progressive emigrants, will break off from the old autocracy and form an independent government. All that might happen without greatly affecting political conditions in Russia itself. The day will undoubtedly come when a constitution will be granted, but even that in itself will not greatly change conditions. Whoever has travelled in Russia away from the cities, observed the inertia of that vast population of peasants, noted the influence of the Church, and how it has been used as a branch of the civil service in the control of the population, will understand how slow must come any political changes which will really radically affect the national life.
My own observation, which has covered a good deal of Russia, bears out most fully the expert opinion expressed above. There may be some slow evolution toward more popular political ideals, but the strength and solidity of the Russian Government is beyond our day to question.
Such a survey of Europe, then, as a journeyman business man might take, can but lead, it seems to me, to the conclusion that on the whole European political conditions to-day point to solidity and security. There will be change, but the change will be development along right economic lines. There is no reason to suppose that the development of political events is to make Europe less strong and able as an industrial competitor. From an economic point of view the political outlook there can be regarded with optimism. The development of politics and the evolution of government give promise of working toward greater economic efficiency, toward a more capable industrialism and an expanding commerce.
France and the Clerical Problem
In the United States the business of Government is the government of business. Questions which come before Congress are nearly always related to business affairs. Once the running of the machinery of Government has been provided for, and the great appropriation bills passed, the further subjects of congressional legislation are with rare exceptions directly concerned with commercial or industrial matters. Congress is a board of directors of a vast business corporation; its problems are business problems; its main work, outside of the conduct of the Government departments, is the fostering of business interests, on the one hand, and, on the other, the control of business organizations.
There is not a member of either house of Congress who cannot with justice lay some claim to familiarity with business matters. The chief interests of all these members of Congress are business interests. The great legislative mainspring is the well-being of the nation’s commercial and industrial life.
In European politics, legislative conditions and questions are widely different from those in our own political life. The American is at once struck by the peculiar fact that business men have small place in the parliaments there. Business questions are overshadowed by questions relating to class prerogative, racial domination and antagonism, church authority, bureau patronage, hereditary power. Legislative programmes frequently turn upon points of sentiment—sentiment of race, of religion, of class, of political theory, or dynastic hope. Broadly speaking, there is no party on the Continent standing solely for a commercial idea. There is no party programme that solidly unites its followers for or against some commercial measure. The platform of parties, the issues on which elections turn, the proposals brought forward for legislative consideration, have comparatively little concern with industry and commerce.
The business man’s first surprise is over the number of controversies in the political life of Europe having no bearing at all on business. He finds there many important public questions, attracting the keenest interest of a whole nation, hut having no relation to financial income of voters.
The European business man does not take to politics, nor does he seem to be much wanted in the political councils. There are three hundred members of the French Senate, and only forty of these are in any way connected with commerce or industry. In the French Assembly the business man is almost a total stranger. In the Reichstag at Berlin business interests are better represented, but in the parliamentary bodies at Vienna and Budapest, where sound commercial legislation is needed as much as anywhere else in Europe, there is heard only endless wrangling of many races. The conservative, sensible voice of the experienced business man is rarely heard effectively in Vienna among those diverse tongues which will unite in no phrase unless it means legislative obstruction.
The parliaments of Europe are far less representative of the people than is the case with us. Under the unfair system of apportionment in Germany and Austria a legislature representative of the people is out of the question. Emperor Willlam’s excursions into world politics would be rudely checked were his actions controlled by a Reichstag truly representative of the will of the majority of his subjects. In France the best elements of the population seem to view politics as they would a sinful occupation. The French Chamber is made up of the most voluble and least valuable elements of the nation. It has been well said that France presents the spectacle of a tranquil nation with an agitated legislature, and that in the Chamber, members freely apply such fitting epithets to one another as irresponsible, riotous, ill-mannered and incoherent, while the great majority of the people whom these men represent are peaceful, thrifty, orderly, sober, and industrious.
No single language could produce the wealth of epithets that abound among the hysterical Czechs, Croats and the dozen other races in the Parliament at Vienna. Many of these distinguished statesmen regard as the most complete political success that action which will effectually block all legislation. Political villification in the Italian Chamber has been cultivated to such a fine art that none but the bravest or the brazenest of statesmen can there be induced to take office.
When comparisons are made between America and Continental Europe, we can find much of which to be proud. Our growth, our wealth, our industries, our resources, our energy, all make flattering comparison with average European conditions. But I believe, in making such comparisons, there is no one thing of which we have the right to be more proud than of the Congress of the United States. Better than any Continental parliament, it represents the people. The one legislative body of the world that is in any way comparable to ours, is the Parliament of Great Britain. In character, intellect, methods, dignity, and in the truthfulness with which each represents the people, the British Parliament and the United States Congress stand in a class quite apart and above any of the parliaments of Continental Europe.
The parliamentary system has nowhere on the Continent developed along lines which produce the best results. The temperament of the Continental nations is not well adapted to party discipline. In a parliamentary system working at its best there must be a party of the Government and a strongly united opposition—two parties with well-defined lines of demarcation. Nowhere on the Continent does that condition exist. Political inclination there tends to the formation of many groups rather than two parties. The lines separating these groups are usually far from clear. An American must be struck by the obvious fact that seldom is the main consideration which holds a group together a distinct commercial idea or programme.
Germany in some ways is an exception. Nowhere else in the world can be found such sharp party discipline as in the Social Democratic party of Germany. Elsewhere, however, the political groups are but loosely bound together. The bonds are usually of a sentimental or racial character, or a fleeting attachment to some political leader. Plans for sound economic legislation looking toward the development of the industrial and commercial life of the nation seem not to offer sufficiently potent reasons anywhere in Europe for holding together a political party. In England, at the moment, there is a sensational exception. Mr. Chamberlain’s fiscal policy, a purely commercial programme, has made a new and clean-cut line of cleavage in British politics and has brought about one of the most remarkable political situations which England has seen within the last fifty years.
There is one type of problem to be found in almost every country in Europe from which happily we are in America altogether free. It has to do in one form or another with the relations between Church and State. It will be more clearly comprehended how great a blessing it is for us to be free from such controversies when something is understood of the bitterness, the blind sacrifice of general good, and the countless obstacles in the way of political progress which these struggles engender.
The most striking instance of such a problem, and one with a phase particularly unfamiliar to us, is the French clerical question. In every European country there is more or less state support of the Church, and that has everywhere resulted in the relations between the Church and State forming at times the subject of bitter controversy. Not only has the one absorbing political question in France for several years been the suppression of the religious orders, but in Italy the strained relations between the Vatican and Quirinal form always an important feature of the situation. In Italy the problem reaches down into the very roots of political life, and must for a long time have a profound effect on the national development, presenting as it does a controversy of the first importance at every election and at every session of Parliament.
A majority of the most intelligent and best meaning voters of France believe that the life of the republic has been in peril. The general attitude of the Church, and particularly the character of the teaching of the religious orders, are the sources of this supposed danger. Nearly half of the youth of France have, even in recent years, received instruction in clerical schools. The belief is firmly fixed in the minds of more than half of the voters that this instruction has tended to raise up enemies of France.
The struggle against the powerful religious orders is by no means a new one there. When the present Government came into office, with Waldeck-Rousseau as Premier, the particular mandate which it had from the voters was to curb the power of the religious orders, and especially to restrict their rights to teach. Curiously the law which Waldeck-Rousseau framed in 1901 almost exactly duplicated one which had been passed a hundred and fifty years ago. The orders flourished in spite of a century and a half of restrictive legislation. When the present Government began its campaign of repression, there were 325,000 members of the orders. They held real estate valued at more than a billion francs, and one of the complaints against them that particularly appealed to the small land-owner was that so vast a property had almost completely been withdrawn from productive usefulness. The personal wealth of the orders was so great it would be difficult to estimate it. Its extent is illustrated by the fact that when the prosecution became severe the sales of their French Government securities were great enough to be the main factor in a market decline that was regarded almost as a national calamity.
A feature of the situation that has been particularly trying has been the unstinted use of this wealth in elections to secure the success of clerical candidates, or rather, to compass in any way possible the defeat of the Republicans.
The relations between Church and State in France are defined by a concordat which stands to-day as Napoleon drew it. Catholics, Protestants and Jews all receive allowances from the state, although the Catholic Church receives 41,000,000 francs of the 43,000,000 of such church subsidies.
The student of French institutions finds the living genius of Napoleon in many phases of government to-day. He seems less like a deposed ruler against whose system of politics nearly a century of effort has been directed than like a vigorous sovereign absent from France on a brief vacation. The influence of Napoleon, in the stamp he left on French institutions, seems after the vicissitude of succeeding monarchy, empire, and republic, and the passing of nearly a century greater than that of any living man. And so this concordat, which he drew in 1801, and which has passed unchanged through succeeding forms of government, has remained to become the chief problem of French politics more than a century after it was signed. The concordat re-established the legal existence of the Catholic Church, which had been annulled by the Revolution. The ecclesiastical property confiscated by the republican government was not restored, and the Pope and his successors were bound not to move to disturb the purchasers of such property. Provision was made for state support of bishops and clergy in lieu of their appropriated property. The Government was given the right to nominate bishops. The Church, therefore, has naturally and inevitably been deeply interested and constantly an important factor in French politics. When the present republic came into being, a republic without republicanism, as it was called on the assembling of the first Chamber, the Republicans would have been in a hopeless minority had it not been for the discord between royalists and Bonapartists. The Clerical party was distinctly anti-republican, and by its political activity and bitterness that party well earned Gambetta’s denunciation as an enemy of the republic. His “Le cléricalisme, voila l’enneme” has for thirty years been a political war cry.
Those who stand for the republic have come naturally to count the Clericals as the enemies of the state. The Clericals have left no lack of reason that this should be so. However vigorously the Republicans might fight the Clericals at the polls or denounce them in the Chamber, they felt always the quicksand in the ground on which the enemies of clericalism were standing, because the next generation of voters was growing up in the clerical schools and was under instruction that if it hardly warranted the charge of being directly seditious and threatening to the life of the state, was certainly not calculated to make these youths republicans.
This state of affairs resulted in a platform which was larger than any single party, a so-called Programme of Republican Defense, on which there has been room not only for Republicans to stand, but breadth enough for Radicals and Socialists as well. It has furnished the basis for the coalition of parties which forms the present Government and has made the common ground on which these groups, holding in some respects most divers political faiths, could be united into what is known as the Republican “Bloc.”
The first change in the law as made by Waldeck-Rousseau in 1901 only went so far as to compel the orders to obtain authorization from the Government for their legal continuation. After Waldeck-Rousseau gave way to Combes, the Government went at the subject in the most thorough-going manner, its aim being so effectually to disband the orders that there should be no possibility of their return to instil into the minds of the French youth doubts and questions as to the republic.
The struggle is one of the sort in which there can be drawn no straight line of right and wrong. It is undoubtedly true that the traditional attitude of the Church and of the Clerical party has been reactionary and generally unfriendly to the republic, that the character of the teaching by the orders has been open to most reasonable and vigorous objection by those who hold firm faith in the principles of republicanism. It is true that the Church has been active in public affairs, perhaps fairly earning the charge that clericalism is a movement “that trespasses, in the name of the Christian faith, on the domain of politics, and that, under the cover of religion, menaces the tranquillity of the state.” There has been ground for objection to the growth of the wealth of the monastic orders, especially when they were directly engaged in commercial affairs. Particularly has there been room for objection when they used their wealth to influence elections. The more rapid advance of those army officers who were educated in the clerical schools, compared with those who received their education elsewhere, has been an annoying evidence of the solidarity of clerical influence. There has been bigotry and narrowness, overzealousness and defiance of law, priestly exhortation better fitted to the stump than the pulpit, and even counselling toward resistance and defiance of law that was well fitted to neither.
It must he remembered, however, that there has been a great and respectable minority holding the most sincere belief in the unwisdom of this restrictive legislation. The programme of the Government has struck at the deepest sensibilities of this minority. There has seemed to be undue haste and needless harshness. The subject touched many interests and appealed to many sentiments and prejudices. It had taken the Republican party thirty years to bring itself to put its fears into legislative enactments, and it could have well afforded to have used greater tact and less haste in enforcing the laws it passed. It has met intolerance with intolerance. It has come dangerously near violating fundamental rights and liberties in its struggle to subdue the orders which it declared were the particular enemies of those very rights and liberties. It has outraged the sentiments of a most important minority and has earned by its methods some of the epithets it has hurled so vigorously at its adversaries. Still it must be remembered that the Republicans have had to engage in this struggle against a most powerful antagonist, one with wealth, organization, time-established position, and with the great advantage of religious bulwarks behind which to fight. It has been war; and war in politics, as between armies, is not the place to look for fine ethical distinctions.
The avowed aim of the Combes ministry to create a ‘lay’ state so far as the schools are concerned, to have a complete monopoly by the state of education, is now a practically accomplished fact. But insetting up in the businesses of education, as in setting up in other businesses, there are attendant expenses. The Government has at once been placed under the necessity of greatly extending the national school system. Thousands of new schools must be provided. The expenditure of sixty million francs is at once required for building new schoolhouses. Then there is an added annual charge of many million francs on national and local budgets to provide for the salaries of the great corps of teachers. Not only were the teaching orders affected, but the nursing orders were suppressed too. Nearly all the hospitals had been economically managed by the nuns; the nuns were replaced by lay workers, and the increased expenditures on that account have been great.
The French budget is one which has tested the keenest ingenuity of each succeeding Finance Minister to reach a satisfactory balance, and all these increased expenditures are bringing forward practical questions of revenue and taxation which are not always relished by even the most zealous supporters of the policy of suppression.
The point in all this that seems specially interesting to Americans is the nature of the controversy and the happy absence in our own political system of the elements that would make such a controversy possible. Here we see the political forces of a great nation absorbed for years in a struggle so bitter as to provoke scenes of the most violent disorder in the Chamber; and in the communes riots, active resistance to law, military suppression, and bloodshed. We observe a struggle in which are brought into fiercest play not only the ordinary political passions, but one in which bigotry, pious prejudice, and exasperated religious sensibilities are met by political intolerance. We see arbitrary power justifying in the name of liberty the invasion of fundamental rights. We note an enactment of harsh and unjust laws which their sponsors believe necessary to preserve the life of the republic.
Can we not, in the face of all that, listen with some complaisance to the imputation that we are a nation of dollar worshippers and that we concern ourselves with no questions of politics that do not affect our pocketbooks?
In spite of all the political energy that has for several years gone into the discussion of the French schools, it has not, unfortunately, led directly toward any effort to improve the existing school system. No party has given serious consideration to a plan insuring better educational preparation for the French youth. No party has made the development of a system of technical schools or the introduction of commercial training an important part of its programme.
The political life of the French nation has for several years centred exclusively about the school system, but there has been no awakening there to the need of advanced methods nor the advantage of new courses such as have been adopted with such admirable results in Germany. That was of course, impossible, considering the nature of the controversy. It will be hardly possible for some years to come. The national school system must now be organized and developed, and for a long time there will be work enough to do to get it in smooth running order, leaving little room to expect radical improvement in methods or extension of scope. What has been going on in France is a fundamental struggle between the Church and State. Ultimately education will probably be benefited, but those on each side of the controversy have had only in mind the question of which should control the educational system. The eventual denunciation of the concordat is one of the certainties of French politics. There are reasons, however, why the movement may now pause. There are other pressing questions, and the forces back of them are in a measure interlocked with those which have dominated the anti-clerical struggle—especially is that true of the demand of the Socialists. The consideration of that subject must be left to a second article, as must also the aspect of the Socialist movement in other countries beside France.