The paternal state in France and Germany

Front matter

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RANGE AND GERMANY i! ■. KY GAUL

Chap. Copyriglit No.

Contents

CHAP. PAGE

I. The Continental System and the Colonial

Failure 3

Chapter I The Coktin'ental System Ai^d The Colonial Failuke

The close of our century presents an extraordinary spectacle of much importance to the next generation of English-speaking people — namely, that while the influence of the continental nations of Europe seems to become more and more restricted to their old territorial limits or to so-called " colonies/' occupied chiefly by soldiers and state officials, the spread of Anglo-Saxon civilization has surpassed all prevision.

Two hundred years ago, according to Macaulay, the population of England and her colonies was between five and six millions. That of France, as set forth in the taxrecords of the year 1698, exceeded nineteen millions, and that of Germany was probably more than twenty-five millions. From that time to the present the French and the German peoples have each doubled in number, but the speakers of English, so early as the year 1831, had increased from five to thirty-five millions, and now number no fewer than one hundred and thirty-five million souls.

But it is not only in population that the English-speaking race leads all others. According to statistics, they are first in almost everything. A glance at Mr. MulhalFs work. The Industries and Wealth of Nations^ shows this fact clearly enough. Whether it is in wealth, energy, steam-power, mannfactnres, commerce, books, or earnings and wages, it is the same story. First comes the United Kingdom, or the United States, then the British colonies, while the rear is brought up by the nations of the European continent.

We all know that individual liberty, reinforced by the discovery of steam and electricity, was the cause of this great progress. The mind of man — not the mountains, the valleys, or the sea — is the true cause of national prosperity ; for the rich territories that were conquered and occupied long ago by Spain and by France remained useless to them. But from the little European island where the old feudal liberties of the nobles had been extended to the masses of the people, and had been preserved and adapted to modern wants, instead of being destroyed, as on the Continent, there issued armies of peaceable settlers to organize new communities in all parts of the globe. They own to - day more than one - half of the world's habitable area. All signs show that the rate at which the English-speaking nations have pushed forward during this century will not only continue, but even increase ; and we may foresee that the unimportance of the continental states of Europe, outside of European boundaries, will become more and more marked.

A glimpse at the statistics of the present colonies of France, and at those which imperial Germany is so fond of quoting as an evidence of its growing importance, shows the almost ludicrous condition of their national expansion.

The French colonies, vast in extent, in spite of former losses, do not contain three hundred thousand Frenchmen ; yet France began to colonize over three hundred years ago. Algeria, the most important colony of France, conquered about sixty-five years ago, situated at a day and a night's travel from French shores, contains, according to the last census, 233,939 Frenchmen. This includes the army and the functionaries whose duty it is to " administer " the country. According to French statistics, all the rest of the French colonies put together do not contain more French inhabitants than could be found in a second-rate town in the mother-country. Even at the time when France possessed the greater part of North America, the condition of state-ridden Canada and Louisiana, and the growing success of English rivals, showed that the prosperity of the New World must come through methods far different from hers.

If we turn to the German efforts at colonization, of which we have heard so much, thanks to German im. perial buncombe during the last quarter of a century, the figures presented by government statistics become so extraordinary that they elicit a smile on the lips of the astonished reader. The prominent fact of these statistics is the paucity — not to say the absence — of German population in the colonies in question, and the vast army of officials. In many important districts the officials make up the bulk of the population reported as Germans, while in others it would appear that the white population, apart from the officials, is principally composed of British subjects. Take German Southwest Africa, for example. Here there are 586 civil officials, or constabulary, while the total of the German population is returned at 932. Of British subjects, however, there are, including the Capelanders, no fewer than 880. An important fact is that most of the German officials are single men, while the Cape settlers have numerous families. In German East Africa the situation is still worse. In the important district of Tanga, the European population returned in June, 1895, amounted only to 134, nearly all German state functionaries. The total exports of all German colonies never greatly exceeded three millions of dollars ; the imports, of which the most important article was alcoholic liquors, till some recent legislation regulated its sale to the natives, never reached even that figure.

An idea of the insignificance of the French and German colonial work may be deduced from the fact that all the French and German inhabitants of these immense territories, conquered purely by force, could not fill a single city such as Melbourne or Cincinnati. Nevertheless, as we remarked, France has worked for three or four centuries at her colonial enterprises ; and, although the German attempt to imitate the Spanish and the French colonial policy is of comparatively recent date, the fact that Germany has continued to pour its large surplus population into Anglo-Saxon countries, and that German emigration has persisted in refusing to settle under the national flag, shows that the German colonial collapse is not due to a mere accident.

It could not be otherwise. An3^body familiar with the needs of a prosperous new community, be it a far western American county, a Ehodesian settlement, or a young town in Australia, knows how indispensable to its life is complete freedom — free scope for all forms of activity, and independence from military and bureaucratic interferejice. But, according to the theory of the German State, such freedom is fatal to German '^^Bildung," or civilizg,|;ion. Thus, even if Germany could succeed in diverting the flow of emigration to her own colonies, the settlers would very soon object to being governed from Berlin by imperial functionaries with no real devotion to the land. Local interests would always be conflicting with bureaucratic rule, for the interests of a military and civil garrison are not identified with those of settlers. Could any prosperous ^^new" community exist without perfect freedom of the press, of '^meetings/' of criticism of the government — liberties so necessary to those whose aim it is to convert v/ildernesses into civilized commonwealths ? Any one who knows how indispensable to the very existence of the German state is the doctrine of government from above, by military obedience to bureaus and red-tape ; and any one who has seen a new, rising community at work in a wild country, knows how antagonistic to each other the interests of the settlers and the interests of the mother - country would necessarily become.

A glance at the conditions regulating to-day all human activity on the continent of Europe shows how unfavorable such conditions are to the development and expansion of the people. The state, with its military and bureaucratic machinery, has gradually absorbed all the people^s energy. The individual man has been stunted by constant pressure from above. Trimmed down to a fore-ordained state pattern, he has lost all those qualities which are indispensable in self-governing communities. Let us consider some of the prominent features of the continental doctrine.

To-day, hardly has the modern French " citizen " or the German '^ subject" opened his eyes in this world before the state appears, compelling the parents or the witnesses of this important event to report it to an official. This statute, enacted originally for purposes of philanthropy, would be quite unobjectionable if it had not soon degenerated into a selfish regulation for recording that one more has been added to the herd of future taxpayers and soldiers. The life of the new citizen or subject does not really belong to him, but to the state, for by another legal statute he is taught that he should be ready at all times to sacrifice his life, not for his own interests or those of his family, but for the political ambition of the government. He is told that he should ^^die for his country." Whether this word '^^ country"* represents true principles for which a man and a Christian should be willing to fight and die, or whether it stands merely for a fictitious ideal with no principles at all, is a matter of no consequence in the case of the citizen.

The child condemned by his ill luck to open his eyes on that part of the world must be a soldier at the disposal of the state. The doctrine is thus taught to the child that military triumphs are the loftiest expression of human power. Thus when the child grows up to be a man, crazed by national education, the only '* unpatriotic " feature of war for him will be its cost, and the only moral question to solve will be whether his country is sure to win. Too often has all Europe been plunged into war simply because success seemed assured to the aggressor.

Now the child goes to school ; also to church, where the paternal state, under the pretence of preaching Christian duties, maintains official state preachers under the supervision of its overseers — the Ministre des Cultes, or Minister of Public AVorship, in France ; the Minister of Ecclesiastical Affairs, in Prussia. The Minister of Worship in France is generally at the same time Minister of Public Education, or of Justice and Fine Arts. The Prussian Minister of Ecclesiastical Affairs is at the

* The French pairie and the German Vaterland, for which there is no adequate expression in English, for the reason that the idea they represent is purely a continental conception.

same time Minister of Medical Affairs and of Public Education.

Thus we see to-day in France forty thousand distributors, or preachers, of official religion, paid by the French state and standing under state supervision. Since the French state has stopped persecuting the Protestants, and since the Protestant religion has had the honor to be " recognized ^^ — this is the official expression — by the state, Catholicism has ceased to be called the ^'^ state religion." The church remains, nevertheless, an institution of the state, saving souls officially, according to church regulations, which must be approved by state functionaries.

As soon as a child's education begins, the state interferes directly and indirectly, for it must stamp on the mind of its young slave a certain doctrine — namely, that without due recognition by the state all attempts at a liberal career are hopelessly surrounded with obstacles. Unless he has a private income, a young man must gain a diploma from the state or starve. All colleges, universities, chemical and physical laboratories, astronomical observatories, public libraries, technical schools, hospitals, and scientific collections are owned and controlled by the state in all continental countries of Europe. All the employes, all the professors in such institutions, are appointed and paid by the state, and are public officials under state supervision. The state has ^'Mind Overseers" as well as '^Church Overseers," and they alone determine whether a man is useful or worthless.

Besides diplomas, titles, decorations, and distinctions of all sorts, the state has other means to influence national intelligence ; nor is its absolute control of all institutions of learning the only power it possesses to govern minds. It accustoms the people to trust only to the judgment of the state for the selection of private advisers or assistants. No man can earn his bread in France or Germany in a liberal profession unless he has publicly been endorsed by the authorities. Without such recognition the people will not trust to merit alone. The faith in the wisdom of the authorities, disastrous though the result may be, is almost a religion among certain classes. Thus the French iourgeois will trust all his savings to the state, and invest all his fortune in government securities instead of private enterprises. This allows the French state, to borrow money at all times, and to increase its debt to a figure which could not be paid off by all the gold now circula.ting in the world — about six billion dollars — but at the same time it has created a habit of which Frenchmen always complain — that of refraining from all enterprises not supported by the state. While the English loan their money with much profit in all parts of the world, the French invest very little, even in their own colonies. They never would have loaned lately so much money to Eussia if the state had not proclaimed so loudly its political partnership with the Russian government.

In all such measures, leading originally to the founding of a paternal state, what was intended by the people to be a safeguard became only a stumbling-block ; what was meant to be a philanthropic stimulant changed to a stupefying drng, a paralyzing weight ; what might have acted as a shield in the hands of guardian angels became a poisoned weapon in the hands of bureaucrats, impelled by ordinary human instincts and passions. As a matter of course, the worse the machine worked, and the more unsatisfactory its results, the more it had to be enlarged and strengthened, and the more complicated it grew.

The system not only kills all inventive propensities^ but acts disastrously in another direction. It fills the conntry with graduates of state institutions, theoretically fit for duties, but with no knowledge of practical work and with no practical sense.

There is not a state to-day on the European continent whose fate may not depend entirely on the result of one or two battles. In this respect none of them could exhibit the staying power recorded in past centuries, when the destiny of the nation could not be decided in one day by the genius or the mistakes of a single man — the commander-in-chief.

Not only has the modern European state transformed all able-bodied men into soldiers, but it has taken possession of them, body and soul, in many other ways. The citizen or subject shall not marry before the state has given him permission ; for the state is paternal indeed, and in order to prevent young people from making a mistake, it prescribes delays, it requires the parents' consent up to a certain age. Should the man be an officer in the national army — and all well-educated young men of good families are generally officers — he is forbidden to marry as he pleases, for the girl must have a specified income or dowry in her own right, and she must prove before competent authorities that she owns a sufficient fortune to marry an officer. In Germany the officers of the regiment themselves, acting as delegates of the state, must refuse their consent if the girl's father makes his living by physical labor ; and no German girl can marry a lieutenant if she has not an income of 2500 marks a year — about six hundred dollars — in her own right. Imagine what an encouragement this is to false declarations, and how many lovers will deposit borrowed securities as a formality, cheating thus the paternal state out of all its calculations. This rule exists in France, in Italy, and elsewhere, as well as in Germany.

Should the citizen or subject decide to sell or buy real estate, ubiquitous state bureaucracy looms up at once ; and no such transfer is possible, unless it is made before a notary at a heavy expense, collected by the state. The recording of the deed alone is useful to the contracting parties, but the state has gradually made this service an excuse for imposing a heavy tax on all transfers of land. The only reason it can give for collecting such a percentage is that it always needs money.

When the citizen dies, the state interferes again; for where an income-tax exists, compelling the citizen to disclose every year an account of his fortune and his income or earnings, the state may examine the assets of the deceased. In some parts of Switzerland even — in the canton of Vaud — there is a law allowing state functionaries to invade the family home where the death has occurred, and to take an inventory, not only of the dead man's money, but even of his furniture. The French iourgeois, however, notwithstanding his traditional submissiveness to state despotism, has never become reconciled to such principles advocated by the continental demagogues, and he has till now sternly refused to allow any law to be passed levying an income-tax. He objects to disclosing his private fortune to the state, and, though willing to pay a high price for the satisfaction of being governed, he does not like to see functionaries poking their noses into his account-books. He knows, besides, what a premium on false declarations the state has established by this tax in all countries where it is levied. But when the citizen or subject is buried, escaping at last by natural laws from those of the paternal state, the control is not ended, for his estate cannot be divided as the owner may have wished. The state knows better than the individual how to divide fairly, and it imposes by law the division among the children. Should the deceased have one child, he can dispose freely only of one-half of his fortune ; if he has two, he can dispose of one-third ; if he has three children or more, he can dispose only of one-fourth. This law varies very little on the Continent. Of course the state never helped the owner in saving his money ; on the contrary, it levied the heaviest possible taxes on everything he owned — on his bread, on his meat, on his salt,* on the oil burning in his lamp, on everything he consumed in order to live, on everything he inherited, and on every sale of land he made ; but the state claims now the right to divide between his children, more equitably than a father, anything he may have left from the agents of the government.

The state has thus reduced this man to the simple r6le of an automaton, of a dummy living under constant tutelage, unfit to live elsewhere than under the shadow of that state whose constant assistance is necessary to him. Is it, then, surprising that the continental races have become unfit to colonize the world, and that their emigrants are unable to form independent, self-governing colonies ?

The paternal duty of the continental state was the reason why such laws were enacted. In its anxiety to correct, amend, and improve individual activity, in wishing to prevent individual mistakes and foster family union, the paternal state, like the paternal church, has reached

* In Italy poor people are not allowed to carry home a pail of sea- water, because they would evaporate it, make a little salt, and thus avoid buying government salt, which is very high-priced.

the opposite results; for being only a human, bureaucratic affair — not a real representative of divine justice or wisdom on earth — it was necessarily controlled, and managed by an oligarchy of agents.

But what have been the other disastrous results of tutelary civil administration in France ? The principle is there laid down that the component parts of the people are unfit to regulate county or departmental affairs, the state alone possessing the necessary intelligence. The prefect and the sub-prefects are invested with a civil authority hardly equalled in Catholic countries and in spiritual affairs by the authority of a bishop. Both these functionaries, the prefect and the bishop, are sent from above ; the one is imposed by the state, the other by the church. The French mind cannot understand self-government in politics, any more than it could understand Protestant Church democracy. At all times, under all regimes — and he has tried them all — the Frenchman must abdicate and delegate his rights of self-government to the state. The rural communes and departments — the counties — must be governed from the central authority in Paris, which, for the welfare of the people, sends out its omnipotent agents — the prefects — intrusted with despotic administrative powers. How this system works may be learned in Taine's well-known Origins of Modern France.

"The prefect," says Taine, "is the conductor or overseer, by legal statute, of all administrative services. In his department he is the chief inquisitor of the republican faith, even in the recesses of home and private life. He is the leader of all acts and sentiments, orthodox or heretic, as the case may be, which can rightfully or wrongfully be imputed to the functionaries of the vast army used by the state to conquer human life ; he is the leader of the twenty different regiments composing this vast hierarchy; he is the overseer of the clergy in his department, of the judiciary, of the preventive and repressing police, of public education, of public charity, of direct and indirect taxation, of the recording officers, of the custom-house ; he is the overseer of state functionaries for bridges and highways, for state forests, for state stud farms, for postal service and telegraph lines, for tobacco and other state monopolies. He is the overseer of all employes in institutes which should be private enterprises, such as the Sevres porcelain state factory, the Gobelins tapestry state factory, the deaf and dumb asylums, and the asylums for the blind, which are all controlled and managed by the state. He is the overseer of all persons occupied in branch state factories where war or navy supplies are prepared, and of many other establishments which I will not mention. Observe that the indulgence or severity of such a man affects in France all the retailers of fermented beverages, 377,000 of them ! That he can take away the bread and butter of 38,000 clergymen, of 45,000 retail dealers of tobacco, of 75,000 road - keepers, and of 120,000 male and female school-teachers ; that directly or indirectly the ill-will or good- will of the prefects, since the new military law was enacted, affects all French adults between twenty and forty-five years of age ; and, since the new school laws were passed, all the children between six and thirteen."* The Minister of Worship, for instance, formally declares to the French parliament that on January 1, 1890, 300 clergymen have been deprived by the state of their official salary, f How the inquisitory French state pokes

* Taine. Le Begime Moderne, p. 430.

its official tools into every French home can be seen by the declarations of Anatole Leroy Beaulieu, in his work. The RepuhUc and the Conservatives, published in March, 1890, in the French Revue des Deux Mondes.

^'1 speak of what I have seen,'' says he ; "I speak of my own district ; it is an eastern department, formerly represented in the House by a radical member. Now, the conservatives having carried the election, the state has first tried to annul this election ; but it could not do it, as the majority was too large. The state has then revenged itself on the voters. The police have gone around in all the rural districts, investigating the conduct of the curates, of the rural constables, of the liquor and tobacco dealers. There was a state doctor of epidemics. He was a conservative. He was removed. The tax-collector, a man who had his home there, was sent west because he was not zealous enough. Every functionary who did not show his grief on the night of the election was threatened. There is no kind of worry that has not been tried ; they have persecuted even the very smallest people ; roadkeepers, for instance, had their salary suspended. In one district nuns were distributing medical remedies to the poor ; the state has enjoined them from doing it, in order to worry the mayor of the town. The mortgagerecorder had an errand-boy, and this boy had been seen distributing circulars of the new candidate. The recorder received a letter from the prefect ordering him to discharge this boy within twenty-four hours."

A¥e stop quoting more instances of this French administrative system, which is more or less in force all over the European continent. The recent debates in the French parliament have exposed the almost incredible despotism of the judiciary branch of the French state. Let us mention only one case.

The Swiss government — known since the Franco-German war for its socialistic tendencies — with characteristic bureaucratic carelessness, requests by telegraph the French government to arrest in Paris one Martouray, a Frenchman, whom it accuses of having sold certain forged bonds, on a specified day, to a banker in Lausanne. Without any inquiry the French government complies with the Swiss request. Martouray is found at once in Paris, thrown into jail, and kept there for days without being able to communicate with anybody ; for no investigation of criminal charges is public anywhere on the European continent — it must be done under ^^ secret criminal proceedings." The unhappy man appeals in vain to the state, and asks to be allowed to summon at once some witnesses. The French Republican state does not even allow him to see an attorney, a friend, or a member of his family. Martouray, wild with despair, commits suicide in his cell. Hardly has he done this when the Swiss government finds out that it has made a mistake, that Martouray is not wanted at all ; and the French authorities, upon investigation, find that the man had not been out of Paris for ten years, and that he had never been in Switzerland.

This incident led to a violent explosion in the French parliament on the 6th of April, 1897. The opposition took advantage of it to attack the government for its constant outrages against individual freedom, which happen almost daily under the law allowing such secret proceedings. With the usual virulence of language so characteristic of French parliaments, a certain M. Dutreix addressed the Minister of Justice, who sits in the House on the government bench.

'^ You are the man who killed Martouray V he exclaims. The French Minister of Justice then rises be- B 17 fore the House. "No, M. Dutreix/' says he ; "I have not killed Martouray ; for the French government has immediately made a complaint to the Swiss government, after finding out the mistake. It is really unfair to accuse the government of having been the cause of this unhappy event of wMcJi the government is eiitiy'ely innocent."

Another member of the opposition rose and testified that the government refused to communicate the documents containing the request of the Swiss authorities. A violent scene followed, the opposition hurling its anathemas — evidently not without good reason this time — at the representatives of the state. Then the Speaker restored order, and the matter stopped there. . As a member of the British parliament. Sir Charles Dilke, recently said in a debate in the House of Commons on the repressive measures taken lately in India, the lettres de cachet of the old French monarchy still exist in France, and no improvement has been made in the judiciary criminal proceedings of the French state since the Bastille was destroyed. A French magistrate, in the French Eepublic, may keep an innocent person in prison for weeks and months, without allowing the accused person to communicate with anybody, not even an attorney. This statute is in force in continental republics as well as in continental monarchies ; and, notwithstanding the disgraceful, ignoble disclosures made in the French courts of justice since Martouray^s case, when several other such cases were revealed, the French people — that so-called "liberty-loving nation," that claims to have taught freedom to the world — keeps on its statute-books regulations similar to those of Oriental despots.

In G-ermany the system is still worse ; for there no opposition dares to attack the government so violently during a parliamentary debate. We shall have occasion later on to see what the civilization consists of that has been impressed on Germany by the German state machine.

The doctrine of the French state, with its unavoidable bureaucratic consequences, is well defined by Taine in the following sarcastic lines : *

*' The state has made its statutes for an 'average Frenchman' — that is, for a fictitious citizen so restricted and reduced in size that nowhere can the statute fit real, living men. With its legislative pair of scissors, at one stroke it has cut out on one single pattern, in the same cloth, thirty-six thousand copies of the same coat ; and this same coat must now fit every commune (county), whatever its natural size may be. The coat is too small for a city, too large for a village ; in both cases it is not appropriate, and is condemned beforehand as a misfit ; for it does not fit the large bodies nor the small ones. But as it was sent from Paris, we have had to put it on and live in it ; and we have lived in it the best we could, every one in such a coat having no better one at hand. Hence, for every one in particular, very strange attitudes ! And for general appearance of the mass, such wonderful effects as neither the governors nor the governed had ever expected to see !"