THE NEW CENTURY

1900-1901

German writers, commenting on the turn of the century, claim to discover a change in the Emperor’s character about this period. He has lost much of his imaginative, his Lohengrin, vein, and has become more practical, more prosaic and matter-of-fact. To use the German word, he is now a Realpolitiker, one who deals in things, not words or theories, and drawing his gaze from the stars makes them dwell more attentively on the immediate practical considerations of the world about him. His nature has not changed, of course, nor his manner, but he has begun to see that he must employ means and ways different from those he employed previously. He has not become a Bismarck, for he still pursues his aims more in the spirit of the colonel of a regiment leading his men to the attack with banners flying, drums beating, swords rattling in their scabbards and mailed gauntlets held threateningly aloft, than in that of the cool and calculating politician ruminating in his closet on the tactics of his opponents, and deliberating how best to meet and confound them; but he gives more thought to what is going on about him, to party politics, to the economic necessities of the hour, and to modern science and its inventions.

What strikes the Englishman perhaps as much as anything in the Emperor’s character at this time is the Cromwellian trait in it. This is a side of his Protean nature which never seems to have been adequately recognized in England, yet in a singularly baffling character-composition it is one of the fundamental elements. The view of Prussian monarchy, inherited from one Hohenzollern to another for generation after generation, that the race of people to which he belonged (with any other race he could include by conquest in it) has been handed over by Heaven for all eternity to his family, naturally predisposes him to take a religious, a patriarchal, one might say an Hebraic, view of government; but in addition we find the warrior spirit at all times going hand in hand with the religious spirit, almost as strongly as in the case of Mahomet with the Koran in one hand and the sword in the other.

There was nothing in the Emperor’s youth to show the existence of deeply religious conviction, but as soon as he mounted the throne, and all through the reign up to the close of the century, indeed some years beyond it, his speeches, especially when he was addressing his soldiery, were filled with expressions of religious fervour. “Von Gotten Gnaden,” he writes as a preface for a Leipzig publication appearing on January 1, 1900,

“is the King; therefore to God alone is he responsible. He must choose his way and conduct himself solely from this standpoint. This fearfully heavy responsibility which the King bears for his folk gives him a claim on the faithful co-operation of his subjects. Accordingly, every man among the people must be thoroughly persuaded that he is, along with the King, responsible for the general welfare.”

It may be noted in passing that Cromwell and the Emperor are alike in being the founders of the great war navies of their respective countries.

On the date mentioned (New Year’s Day), in the Berlin arsenal when consecrating some flags, he addressed the garrison on the turn of the year:

“The first day of the new century finds our army, that is our folk in arms, gathered round its standards, kneeling before the Lord of Hosts and certainly if anyone has reason to bend the knee before God, it is our army.”

“A glance at our standards,” the Emperor continued,

“is sufficient explanation, for they incorporate our history. What was the state of our army at the beginning of the century? The glorious army of Frederick the Great had gone to sleep on its laurels, ossified in pipeclay details, led by old, incapable generals, its officers shy of work, sunk in luxury, good living, and foolish self-satisfaction. In a word, the army was no longer not only not equal to its task, but had forgotten it. Heavy was the punishment of Heaven, which overtook it and our folk. They were flung into the dust, Frederick’s glory faded, the standards were cast down. In seven years of painful servitude God taught our folk to bethink itself of itself, and under the pressure of the feet of an arrogant usurper (Napoleon) was born the thought that it is the highest honour to devote in arms one’s life and property to the Fatherland the thought, in short, of universal conscription.”

The word for conscription, it may be here remarked, is in German Wehrpflicht, the duty of defence. To most people in England it means simply “compulsory military service.” It is important to note the difference, as it explains the German national idea, and the Emperor’s idea, that all military and naval forces are primarily for defence, not offence. This is, indeed, equally true of the British, or perhaps any other, army and navy; but how many Englishmen, when they think of Germany, can get the idea into the foreground of their thoughts or accustom themselves to it?

However, we have not yet done with the Emperor’s baffling character. There was a third element that now developed in it the modern, the twentieth-century, the American, the Rockefeller element. It is intimately connected with his Weltpolitik, as his Weltpolitik is with his foreign policy in general indeed one might say his Weltpolitik is his foreign policy a policy of economic expansion, with a desperate apprehension of losing any of the Empire’s property, and a determination to have a voice in the matter when there is any loose property anywhere in the world to be disposed of. To the Hebraic element and the warrior element (an entirely un-Christlike combination, as the Emperor must be aware) there now began to be added the mercantile, the modern, the American element the interest in all the concerns of national material prosperity, in the national accumulation of wealth, the interest in inventions, in commercial science, in labour-saving machinery, the effort to win American favour, to facilitate intercourse and establish close and profitable relations with that wealthy land and people.

We know that the Emperor has English blood in him, greatly admires England, and is immensely proud of being a British admiral. We have seen him exhibiting traits of character that remind one of Lohengrin or Tancred. He has played many parts in the spirit of a Hebrew prophet and patriarch, of a Frederick the Great, a Cromwell, a Nelson, a Theodore Roosevelt. Preacher, teacher, soldier, sailor, he has been all four, now at one moment, now at another. We shall find him anon as art and dramatic critic, to end so far as we are concerned with him as farmer. Is it any wonder if such a man, mediaeval in his nature and modern in his character, defies clear and definite portrayal by his contemporaries?

Taking the year 1900 as the first year of the new century, not as some calculators, and the Emperor among them, take it, as the last year of the old, the twentieth century may be said to have opened with a dramatic historical episode in which the Emperor and his Empire took very prominent parts the Boxer movement.

Little notice has been taken in our account of Germany’s spacious days of her relations to China and the Far East generally. They were, nevertheless, all through that period intimately connected with her expansion or dreams of expansion. About 1890 the Flowery Land awoke to the benefits of European civilization and in particular of European ingenuity; and in 1891, for the first time in Chinese history, foreign diplomatists were granted the privilege of an annual reception at the Chinese Court. So exclusive was the Manchu dynasty the Hohenzollerns of China in point of antiquity; yet not a score of years later the Manchu monarchy had been quietly removed from its five-thousand-year-old throne, and China, apparently the most conservative and monarchical people on earth, proclaimed itself a republic a regular modern republic! an operation that among peoples claiming infinite superiority to the Chinese would have cost thousands of lives and a vast expenditure of money.

Naturally, once China showed a willingness to abandon its axenic attitude towards foreign devils and all things foreign-devilish, the European Powers turned their eyes and energies towards her, and a strenuous commercial and diplomatic race after prospective concessions for railways, mines, and undertakings of all kinds began. Each Power feared that China would be gobbled up by a rival, or that at least a partition of the vast Chinese Empire was at hand. Consequently, when China was beaten in her war with Japan, and made the unfavourable treaty of Shimonoseki, the European Powers were ready to appear as helpers in time of need. Russia, Germany, and France got the Shimonoseki Treaty altered, and the Laotung Peninsula with Port Arthur given back, and in return Russia acquired the right to build a railway through Manchuria (the first step towards “penetration” and occupation), French engineers obtained several valuable mining and railway concessions, and Germany got certain privileges in Hankow and Tientsin.

Meantime the old, deeply-rooted hatred of the foreign devil, the European, was spreading among the population, which was still, in the mass, conservative. Missionaries were murdered, and among them, in 1897, two German priests. Germany demanded compensation, and in default sent a cruiser squadron to Kiautschau Bay. Russia immediately hurried a fleet to Port Arthur and obtained from China a lease of that port for twenty-five years. England and France now put in a claim for their share of the good things going. England obtained Wei-hai-Wei, France a lease of Kwang-tschau and Hainan. China was evidently throwing herself into the arms of Europe, when, in 1898, the Dowager Empress took the government out of the hands of the young Emperor and a period of reaction set in. The appearance of Italy with a demand for a lease of the San-mun Bay in 1899 brought the Chinese anti-foreign movement to a head, and the Boxer conspiracy grew to great dimensions.

The movement was caused not merely by religious and race fanaticism, but by the popular fear that the new European era would change the economic life of China and deprive millions of Chinese of their wonted means of livelihood. The Dowager Empress and a number of Chinese princes now joined it. Massacres soon became the order of the day, and it is calculated that in the spring of 1900 alone more than 30,000 Christians were barbarously done to death. Among the victims were reckoned 118 English, 79 Americans, 25 French, and 40 of other nationalities. The Ambassadors and Ministers of all nations, conscious of their danger, applied to the Tsungli Yamen (Foreign Office), demanding that the Imperial Government should crush the Boxer movement. The Government took no steps, the diplomatists were beleaguered in their embassies, and were only saved by friendly police from being murdered.

This, however, was but a temporary respite, and it became necessary to bring marines from the foreign ships of war lying at the mouth of the Pei-ho River just out of range of the formidable Taku Forts. These troops, 2,000 in all, were led by Admiral Seymour. They tried to reach Pekin, but failed owing to the destruction of the railway, and retired to Tientsin, from whence, however, on June 16th, a detachment set out to capture the Taku Forts. The capture was effected, the German gunboat Iltis, under Captain Lans, playing a conspicuously brave part. Tientsin was now in danger from the Boxer bands, but was relieved by a mixed detachment of Russians and Germans under General Stoessel, the subsequent defender of Port Arthur.

The alarm meantime at Pekin was intense. The Chinese Government, throwing off all disguise, ordered the diplomatists to leave the city. They refused, knowing that to leave the shelter of the embassies meant torture and death. One of them, however, the German Minister, Freiherr von Ketteler, ventured from his Legation and was killed in broad daylight on his way to the Chinese Foreign Office. Only one of the Minister’s party escaped, to stagger, hacked and bloody, into the British Legation with the news. This Legation, as the strongest building in the quarter, became the refuge of the entire diplomatic corps, with their wives, children, and servants. It was straightway invested and bombarded by the Boxers, and as the days and weeks went on the other Legation buildings were burned, and the refugees in the British Legation had to look death at all hours in the face.

The murder of von Ketteler excited anger and horror throughout the world, and in no breast, naturally, to a stronger degree than in that of the German Emperor. All nations hastened to send troops to Pekin. Japan was first on the scene with 16,000 men under General Yamagutschi. Russia followed next with 15,000 under General Lenewitch, then England with 7,500 under General Gaselee, then France with 5,000 under General Frey, then America with 4,000 under General Chaffee, Germany with 2,500 under von Hopfner, Austria and Italy with smaller contingents in all more than 50,000 men, with 144 guns. A little later the expeditionary corps from Germany, 19,000 strong, under General von Lessel, and that from France, 10,000 strong, arrived. At the suggestion, it is said, of Russia, and by agreement among the European Powers, united by a common sympathy and in face of a common danger, the German Field-Marshal, Count Waldersee, was appointed to the supreme command of all the European forces. At the same time naval supports were hurried by all maritime nations to the scene, and within a short period 160 warships and 30 torpedo boats were assembled off the Chinese coast.

The march to Pekin and the relief of the imprisoned Europeans are incidents still fresh in public memory. In the crowded British Legation fear alternated with hope, and hope with fear, until, on the forenoon of August 14th, a boy ran into the Legation crying that “black-faced Europeans” were advancing along the royal canal in the direction of the building. In a few minutes a company of Sikh cavalry, part of some Indian troops diverted on their way to Aden, galloped up, all danger was over, and the refugees were saved.

The Boxer troubles ended on May 13, 1901, with the signature by Li Hung Chang in the name of the Emperor of China of a treaty of peace, the main conditions of which were the payment by China within thirty years of a war indemnity to the Powers of 450 million taels (L66,000,000) and an agreement to send a mission of atonement to the Courts of Germany and Japan for among the foreign victims of the Boxers in the previous year had been the Japanese representative in China, Baron Sugiyama.

For two or three weeks the action of the Emperor with regard to the Chinese mission of atonement brought him into universal ridicule. Prince Chun, a near relative of the Chinese Emperor, who had been appointed to conduct the mission, reached Basle in September, 1901, on his way to Berlin. Here he lingered, and it soon became known that a hitch had occurred in his relations with Germany. It then transpired that the delay was caused by the Emperor’s having suddenly intimated that he expected Prince Chun to make thrice to him, as he sat on his throne at Potsdam, the “kotow” as practised in the Court of China. In view of the surprise, laughter, and criticism of Europe, the Emperor modified his demand for the “kotow” to its symbolic performance by three deep bows. Prince Chun thereupon resumed his journey. An impressive, if theatrical, scene was prepared in the New Palace at Potsdam, where the Emperor, seated on the throne, his marshal’s baton in his hand, and flanked by Ministers and the officers of his household, received the bearer of China’s expressions of regret. Whatever one may think of the scenic effect provided, the reply the Emperor made to Prince Chun, after the three bows arranged upon had been made, is a model of its kind general not personal, sorrowful rather than angry, warning rather than reproachful. The Emperor said

“No pleasing nor festive cause, no mere fulfilment of a courtly duty, has brought your Imperial Highness to me, but a sad and deeply grave occurrence. My Minister to the Court of his Majesty the Emperor of China, Freiherr von Ketteler, fell in the Chinese capital beneath the murderous weapons of an imperial Chinese soldier, who acted by the orders of a superior, an unheard-of outrage condemned by the law of nations and the moral sense of all countries. From your Imperial Highness I have now heard the expression of the sincere and deep regret of his Imperial Majesty the Emperor of China regarding the occurrence. I am glad to believe that your Imperial Highness’s royal brother had nothing to do with the crime or with the further acts of violence against inviolable Ministers and peaceful foreigners, but all the greater is the guilt which attaches to his advisers and his Government. Let these not deceive themselves by supposing that they can make atonement and receive pardon for their crime through this mission alone, and not through their subsequent conduct in the light of the prescriptions of international law and the moral principles of civilized peoples. If his Majesty the Emperor of China henceforward directs the government of his great Empire in the spirit of these ordinances, his hope that the sad consequences of the confusion of last year may be overcome, and permanent, peaceful and friendly relations between Germany and China may exist as before, will be realized to the benefit of both peoples and the whole of civilized humanity. In the sincere wish that it may be so, I welcome your Imperial Highness.”

The Emperor’s other speeches referring to the Boxer movement at this period have been adversely commented on as showing him in the light of a cruel and blood-thirsty seeker after revenge. This is an unjust, at least a hard, judgment. A passage in his address at Bremerhaven to the expeditionary force when setting out for China is the main proof of the charge in which, after referring to the murder of von Ketteler, he said:

“You know well you will have to fight with a cunning, brave, well-armed, cruel foe. When you come to close quarters with him remember quarter (’Pardon’ is the German word the Emperor used) must not be given: prisoners must not be taken: manage your weapons so that for a thousand years to come no Chinaman will dare to look sideways at a German. Act like men.”

It is difficult, of course, to reconcile such an address with Christian humanity practised, so far as humanity can be practised, in modern war, but it should be remembered that the Emperor was speaking in a state of great excitement, and that, according to Chancellor Prince Buelow’s statement in the Reichstag subsequently, confirmation of the news of the murder of his Minister to China had only reached the Emperor ten minutes before he delivered the speech.

There is one incident, however, though not a very important one, in connexion with the troubles, which may fairly be made a matter of reproach to the Emperor the seizure, on his order, of the ancient astronomical instruments at Pekin and their transference to Sans Souci, in Potsdam, where they are to be seen to the present day. The troops of all nations, it is known, looted freely at Pekin; but the Emperor might have spared China and his own fair fame the indignity of such public vandalism.

While writing of China it may not be superfluous to add that the Emperor’s foreign policy in the Orient cannot be expected to present exactly the same features, or proceed quite along the same lines, as his foreign policy in Europe. By far the greater part of Europe is now as completely parcelled out and as permanently settled as though it were a huge, well-managed estate. The capacities of its high roads, its railways, its great rivers, with their commercial and strategic values and relations are perfectly ascertained; and the knowledge, it is not too much to say, is the common property of all important Governments. It is not so, or not nearly to the same extent, in the Orient. In Europe there is little or no difficulty in distinguishing between enterprises that are political and those that are commercial, or in recognizing where they are both; and if a difficulty should arise it can be arranged by diplomatic conversations, by a conference of the Powers interested, or in the last resort short of war by arbitration. This is not so simple a matter in the Orient, where conditions are at once old and new, where interests of possibly great magnitude are as yet undetermined or unappropriated, where possibly great mineral sources are undeveloped and the capacities of new markets unascertained; where, in short, the decisive factors of the problem are undiscovered, it may be unsuspected.

In such cases there is often no certain and readily recognizable line of demarcation between the two kinds of enterprise; and an undertaking that may present all the appearance of being a purely commercial scheme, and be solemnly asseverated to be such by the Power or Powers promoting it, may turn out on closer examination to be one of great political significance and incalculable political consequence. Of such enterprises two immediately spring to mind, the Cape to Cairo railway and the Baghdad railway, not to mention a score of problematic undertakings in other parts of Africa or Asia. It will be useful to keep this general consideration in view when forming an opinion regarding the Emperor’s Oriental policy. That policy is, so far, almost entirely commercial. Long ago wars used to be made for the sake of religion, then for the sake of territory. Now they are made for the sake of new markets.

Yet the Far East is changing with the change in conditions everywhere in modern times, and it is evident that the premises for any conclusion as to German foreign policy there may, at any given moment, be subject to modification. Partly owing to the growth of Germany’s European influence, and to the increase in her navy which has helped her to it, she is to be found of recent years playing a rôle in the Far East which would have been unintelligible to the German of the last generation. There are many Germans to-day, as in Bismarck’s time, who ridicule the notion that the possibilities of trade in Oriental countries justify the national risk now run for it and the national expenditure now made upon it; but it is sometimes forgotten that, apart from the chance of obtaining concessions for the building of railways, for the establishment of banks, for the leasing of mines and working of cotton plantations, there is a large German export of beads, cloth, and, in short, of hundreds of articles which appeal to barbarian or only semi-civilized tastes.

Germany, too, looks hopefully forward to a future in which she will be supplied with the raw material of her manufactures by her colonies, or failing that by her subjects trading abroad in the colonies of other nations. This is one of the main objects of her Weltpolitik. As Prince von Buelow said: “The time has passed when the German left the earth to one neighbour and the sea to another, while he reserved heaven, where pure doctrines are enthroned, to himself;” and again: “We don’t seek to put anybody in the shade, but we demand our place in the sun;” and the idea finds technical expression in the phrase on which Germany lays so much stress, the “maintenance of the open door.” Her policy in the Far East, as in Europe, is thus on the whole a commercial one; she seeks there as elsewhere new markets, not new territory. Accordingly she supports the principle of the status quo in China, and therefore raised no objection to the Anglo-Japanese Agreement of 1902 which, among other objects, secured it.

In January, 1901, the Emperor was called to England by the sudden, and, as it was to prove, fatal illness of his grandmother, Queen Victoria. His journey to Osborne, where he arrived just in time to be recognized by the dying Queen, and his abandonment of the idea, impressive and almost sacred to a Prussian King and the Prussian people, of being present on his birthday, January 27th, at the bicentenary celebration of the foundation of the Prussian Kingdom, made a deep and sympathetic impression on the people of England. Usually on State occasions the Emperor does not display a countenance of good humour, or indeed of any sentiment save perhaps that of a sense of dignity; but on the occasion in question, as he rode in the uniform of a British Field-Marshal beside Edward VII, his looks were those of genuine sorrow. Public sympathy was not lessened when it became known that he had mentioned the pride he felt in being privileged to wear the uniform of two such soldiers of renown as the Duke of Wellington and Lord Roberts; and added that the privilege would be highly estimated by the whole German army. It was a chivalrous remark, the offspring of a chivalrous disposition.

The Emperor had hardly returned to Germany when, on February 6th, the only attack ever made on his person occurred in Bremen. He had been at a banquet in the town hall, and was being driven through the illuminated streets to the railway station to return to Berlin, when a half-witted locksmith’s apprentice of nineteen, Dietrich Weiland by name, flung a piece of railway iron at him with such good aim that it struck him on the face immediately under the right eye, inflicting a deep and nasty, but not dangerous wound. The Emperor proceeded with his journey, the doctors attending to his injury in the train, and in a few weeks he was well again. Weiland was sent to a criminal lunatic asylum. The attempt had, apparently, nothing to do with Anarchism or Nihilism or the Social Democracy. When the Emperor alluded to it afterwards in his speech to the Diet, he referred it to a general diminution of respect for authority.

“Respect for authority,” he said to the Diet,

“is wanting. In this regard all classes of the population are to blame. Particular interests are looked to, not the general well-being of the folk. Criticism of the measures of the Government and Throne takes the coarsest and most injurious forms and hence the errors and demoralization of our youth. Parliament must help here, and a change must be made, beginning with the schools.”

It was natural enough that a few days after, addressing the Alexander Regiment of Guards, who were taking up quarters in a new barracks near the palace in Berlin, he should tell them the barracks were like a citadel to the palace, and that, as a sort of imperial bodyguard, the regiment “must be ready, day and night as once before” he was referring to the “March Days” “to meet any attack by the citizens on the Emperor.”

At Bonn in April the Emperor attended the matriculation (immatriculation, the Germans call it) of his eldest son, the Crown Prince, at the university. He was in civil dress, one of the rare public occasions during the reign when he has not been in uniform, but this did not prevent him delivering a martial address to the Borussians. “I hope and expect from the younger generation,” he said to the students,

“that they will put me in a position to maintain our German Fatherland in its close and strong boundaries and in the congeries of German races doing to no one favour and to no one harm. If, however, anyone should touch us too nearly, then I will call upon you and I expect you won’t leave your Emperor sitting.”

A great shout of “Bravo!” went up when the Emperor ceased, and the students doubtless all thought what a fine thing it would be if he would only lead them straightway against those cheeky Englanders.

At the end of June, on board the Hamburg-American pleasure-steamer Princess Victoria Luise, the Emperor pronounced the famous sentence “Our future lies on the water.” The year before he had said something like it, and it is worth quoting as the Emperor’s first explicit allusion to Weltpolitik. “Strongly,” he exclaimed,

“dashes the beat of ocean at the doors of our people and compels it to preservation of its place in the world, in a word, to Weltpolitik. The ocean is indispensable for Germany’s greatness. The ocean testifies that on it and far beyond it no important decision will be taken without Germany and the German Emperor.”

His words on the present occasion were:

“My entire task for the future will be to see that the undertakings of which the foundations have been laid may develop quietly and surely. We have, though as yet without the fleet as it should be, achieved our place in the sun. It will now be my task to hold this place unquestioned, so that its rays may act favourably on trade and industry and agriculture at home inside, and on our sail-sports on the coast for our future lies on the water. The more Germans go on the sea whether travelling or in the service of the State the better. When the German has once learned to look abroad and afar he will lose that ‘hang’ towards the petty, the trivial, which now so often seizes him in daily life.”

And he closed: “We must now go out in search of new spots where we can drive in nails on which to hang our armour.”

Early in August the Emperor was called to the death-bed of his mother, the Empress Frederick, at her castle in Cronberg. She died on the afternoon of her son’s arrival, on August 5th. The Emperor ordered mourning throughout the Empire for six weeks, and forbade all “public music, entertainments, theatrical or otherwise” until after the funeral. The Empress was buried in the mausoleum attached to the Friedenskirche in Potsdam on the 13th of the month.

The delivery of a famous speech on art by the Emperor in December brings the chronicle of 1901 to a close, but perhaps it will not displease the reader if a new chapter is opened for the purpose of quoting it and of considering the Emperor in what is a traditional Hohenzollern relationship.