In the spacious days of Elizabeth, Englishmen and Englishwomen too of the best class were eager to learn and prized learning perhaps above its value; the Queen herself knew four or five languages fairly well, better than any English sovereign since. One other fact that an Englishman should always keep before him: the population of Great Britain at the end of the sixteenth century was roughly five millions; at the end of the nineteenth it was some forty-five millions, or nine times as many; yet three-fourths of all the schools today in England for higher education were there in the days of Elizabeth.
That fact and all it involves explains to me the efflorescence of genius in the earlier, greater age: the population has grown nine-fold, the educated class had not doubled its numbers, and certainly has not grown in appreciation or understanding of genius.
I am the more inclined to preach from this text because it suggests the true meaning of the World War, which England has steadily refused to learn.
When from 1900 to 1910 she saw herself overtaken by Germany, not only in the production of steel, but also of iron and coal, England ought to have learned what her contempt of learning and love of sport were costing her, and have put her house in order in the high sense of the word. For a hundred years now she has been sending some of her ablest sons to govern India. She ought to have learned from Machiavelli that every possession of the Romans not colonized by Latins was a source of weakness in time of war. England ought to withdraw from India and Egypt as soon as possible and concentrate all her forces on developing her own colonies, who will always trade with her for sentimental reasons and by compulsion of habit. The Canadian buys six times as much of English goods as the American, and the Australian spends twenty times more on English products than on German, in spite of the superior qualities of the German output. The worst of it is that the English guides and leaders do not even yet grasp the truth.
But at the time the growth of Germany and its eager intellectual life only confirmed me in the belief that by nationalizing the land and socializing the chief industries such as railways, gas and water companies, which are too big for the individual to manage, one could not only lift the mass of the English people to a far higher level, but at the same time intensify their working power. It would surely be wise to double the wages of the workman when you could thereby increase the productivity of his labour. Moreover the nationalization of the railways, gas, water and mining companies would give five millions of men and women steady and secure employment and sufficient wages to ensure decent conditions of life; five millions of workmen more could be employed on the land in life-leases, and in this way Great Britain might be made self-supporting and her power and wealth enormously increased.
I tell all this because I resolved to make myself a social reformer and began to practice extempore speaking for at least half an hour daily.
From Goettingen after three semesters I went to Berlin; it was tune; I needed the stimulus of the theatre and galleries of art and the pulsing life of a great city. But there was something provincial in Berlin; I called it a Welt-dorf, a world-village; yet I learned a good deal there: I heard Bismarck speak several times and carried away deathless memories of him as an authentic great man. In fact, I came to see that if he had not been born a Junker in a privileged position and had not become a corps-student to boot, he might have been as great a social reformer as Carlyle himself. As it was, he made Germany almost a model state. He was accused in the Reichstag one day by a socialist of having learned a good deal from Lassalle; he stalked forth at once and annihilated his critic by declaring that he would think very little of anyone who had had the privilege of knowing that extraordinary man and had not learned from him. It was Bismarck, I believe, who was responsible for the first steps towards socializing German industries; Bismarck who established the land-banks to lend money on reasonable terms to the farmers; Bismarck too who dared first to nationalize some German railways and municipalize gas and water companies; and provide for the extension by the state of the canal system.
Under his beneficent despotism, too, the municipalities of Germany became instruments of progress; slums disappeared from Berlin and the housing of the poor excited the admiration of even casual foreign visitors; his bureausbureaus, providing suitable employment, were copied timidly forty years later in London. It is not too much to say that he practically eradicated poverty in Germany.
The great minister himself anticipated that his attempts to lift the lowest class to a decent level would hem industrial progress and make it more difficult for the captains of industry to amass riches, but in this he was completely mistaken. He had given help and hope to the very poor, and this stimulus to the most numerous class vivified the industry of the whole nation; the productivity of bureaus increased enormously: German workmen became the most efficient in the world, and in the decade before the great war, the chief industries of steel and iron, which twenty years before were not half so productive as those of Great Britain, became three and four fold more productive, and showing larger profits, made competition practically impossible. The vivifying impulse reached even to the shipping, and while it became necessary for the British government to help finance the Cunard line, the Hamburg-America became the chief steamship line of the world and made profits that turned English shippers green with envy: immigration into Germany reached a million a year, exceeding even that into the United States. And this astounding development of industry and wealth was not due to natural advantages, as in the United States, but simply to wise, humane government and to better schooling. Every officer on a German liner spoke at least French and English as well as German, whereas not one English or French officer in a hundred understood any language save his own.
Looking over the unparalleled growth of the country and its prodigious productivity and wealth, it is hardly to be wondered at that the ruler ascribed the astonishing prosperity to his own wisdom and foresight. It really appeared that Germany in a single generation had sprung from the position of a second rate power to the headship of the modern world. And already in the early eighties, the future development could be foreseen. I spent one month of my holidays in Dusseldorf and Essen and was struck on all hands by the trained and cultured intelligence of the directors and foremen of the chief industries. The bureaus saving appliances alone reminded me of the best industries in the United States; but here there was a far wider and yet a specialized intelligence. Someday soon the whole story will be told properly, but even now in 1924 it's clear that the rival nations, instead of following Germany and bettering Bismarck's example, are resolved on degrading, dismembering and punishing her. It makes one almost despair of humanity.
After Goettingen and Berlin, I went to Munich, drawn by the theatre and Opera-House, by Ernst Possart, the greatest Shylock I ever saw and assuredly the best-graced, all-round actor, except the elder Coquelin, who ruled the stage and was perfection perfected. And the music at Munich was as good as the acting: Heinrich Vogl and his wife were both excellent interpreters and through them, as I have told, I came to know Richard Wagner. In my fourth volume of Contemporary Portraits I've done my best to picture him in his habit as he lived; but I left out half-consciously two or three features which it seemed to me hardly right to publish just when I had learned in 1922 that Cosima Wagner was still alive. Here I may be franker. In my "portrait" I left it half in doubt as to the person who was the Isolde, or inspiring soul, of that wonderful duo of love which is the second act of Tristan. Of course there is no doubt whatever that Mathilde von Wesendonck was Wagner's Isolde; he wrote it to her in so many words: "Throughout eternity I shall owe it to you that I was able to create Tristan."