weak, and divided Germany, became an intensely nationalistic reality in a united, imperialistic, industrial, and prosperous Germany. Thus I think that Professor Francke is entirely right in saying that in the Germanic exaltation of the state as a supreme ethical entity, the line of moral regeneration which took its start from Kant reached its climax. But there are also opportunities for degeneration when moral obligation is found in political subordination and subservience.

At all events, the fact that German thought still entertains a type of moral conception which has well-nigh evaporated in the cultures of other modern nationalities, throws light on the difficulties the nonGerman world has in understanding the language in which intellectual Germans formulate their ideas and justify their practical policies. The Germans are always saying that the American lack of sympathy with the German cause is due to the fact that we get our information from British sources, and hence do not understand the Germans. Well, it is not a matter of the source of our information, but of the source of our ideas. And it is not a matter of the past year or the past twenty years. For over two hundred years our minds have been educated in English political ideas to which German thought is foreign; for over a hundred years, our ideas have been fed upon an even more disparate social philosophy, that of the French struggle for liberté. There can be no disguising the fact that our American conception of Freedom is incompatible with the idea of duty as that has developed in Germany. I make no attempt to decide which is right. only say that they are so incompatible that minds nourished on one ideal cannot readily understand the type of mind nurtured by the other.

The second element in the continuous tradition of Germany is said to be the ideal of ceaseless, restless striving. The gospel of the strenuous life, of the value of energy of will for its own sake, has sometimes been thought to be peculiarly American. I think Professor Francke is right in believing it to be distinctively German. An American must after all have an end to call out and center his activities. Results are needed to justify an activity. Otherwise his restless striving, his taut energy, becomes neurasthenic. I fear we are not sufficiently particular as to the character of the end or the quality of the results. Almost anything will do, from win

ning a ball game, or forming the biggest business corporation in the world, to converting a community to Billy Sundayism. But some end there must be to account for the expenditure of energy. Otherwise the cult of will never lays hold of us. Consequently, when we find the example of Emperor William cited as a "particularly conspicuous evidence of this spirit of striving," as an example of "universal and impassioned impulse of achievement," our reaction is cynical rather than admiring. That, we say to ourselves, is just about the sort of example we should expect to find. We have difficulty in understanding it as other than a semi-pathological love of the lime-light. We may be wrong, but we cannot, it must be admitted, understand how and why we are wrong. For it is ingrained in us that some end there must be for energy which is exercised. Towards activity merely as ceaseless striving we react in what is perhaps our most characteristic national slang: Give us a rest.

To the German, on the other hand, this inability of ours is another evidence of our utilitarianism, our Philistine culture. But even Germans recognize, I think, that this idea of universal striving as an end in itself is a child of Romanticism. Similarity of words is often a bar to mutual understanding. The Germans say Wille; we say will. Hence the easy assumption of a community of meaning. But our word is affected (or infected, if you please) with the spirit of a Puritanic morality, and of struggle for political liberties and economic savings. The word suggests personal resolution and endurance in the face of disagreeable odds. But Wille suggests an impersonal, an absolute energy striving through personal channels for manifestation. It is affected by the Romantic movement. The conception is calculated to impart a tinge of enthusiasm to deeds otherwise prosaic; it colors with emotional universality (or mysticism) the specific jobs which have to be done. But it also is admirably calculated to serve as a protective moral device. Activities which are "all too human," activities which have a definite practical goal of advantage in view, seem to lose all taint of self-seeking and to gain a sacred character when they are felt to be manifestations of a universal Overwill. Materialistic things look quite different when they are viewed as the necessary consequences of an idealistic devotion to the gospel of ceaseless striving; when they are

looked upon as the conquest of spiritual will over matter. The doctrine lends itself, assuredly, to intellectual confusion and to selfdeception.

Moreover, this conception has also been invaded by the nationalistic idea-by the conception of the German state as a peculiar incarnation of a spiritual force unfolding in history. The older Romanticism was at least confined to superior personalities striving for wide cultural achievements in their own private spheres. Transfer the habitat of spiritual energy from the strivings of the private person for the enrichment of his own life to the organized public state striving for the expansion of its own powers, and you get something like the current Teutonic apologia for the present war. I have no doubt that there are some German statesmen who know precisely what the present war is about; what particular concrete gains are at stake. But to the "intellectuals" of Germany-vide the manifestos they have showered upon us-the object is that utterly Romantic thing: the expansion of Kultur, the spread of distinctively German ways of thinking and feeling. In short, the war is a part of the ceaseless striving for realization on the part of the Wille embodied in the German people. That the French and the English should have specific objects in view, particular advantages to gain and disadvantages to avoid, seems to many highly instructed Germans (if we may trust their language) something peculiarly base. It is no wonder that the German rulers frequently speak with contempt of the political capacity of German subjects. But one must question whether there is anything but a diversion of what might have been political capacity into the channels of Romanticism.

The extraordinary revival of interest in the Middle Ages associated with Romanticism is a familiar fact. To it we owe most of our modern appreciation of the real life of that period. One may ask, however, whether we are dealing with a revival or a reversion. The affection of the Romantic spirit for the Middle Ages seems to be an expression of its own medieval quality. I am not ambitious to characterize the spirit of Romanticism as that has shown itself in Germany. But certainly one of its marked features is an exuberance of unchastened imagination, and an introspective reveling in the emotional accomplishments of such an imagination. How largely German philosophy has sought refuge in an inner world, a

world of consciousness; how largely it has made traits of this inner life a measure of reality! From the standpoint of one who is not a subject of Romanticism this means but one thing. The Romantic spirit has deliberately evaded the testing and sifting of emotions and ideas; it has declined to submit them for valuation to the tests of hard and sober fact. It has avoided the test of attempted execution in action. To those who believe that human consciousness is a wild riot of imagination until human beings act upon it and thus bring it to the test of reality, Romanticism can mean only an undisciplined imagination, immaturity of mind.

It sounds silly to say that Germans, with their devotion to science and their habits of subordination to authority, have brought into the modern world of politics the untried and unchastened fancies and feelings of medievalism. But I mean only what the Germans themselves say when they tell us that they combine with supreme discipline in the outer world of action supreme freedom in the inner world of thought. I mean what they themselves mean when they say that the German people as a people lack the political sense, the political capacity of the selfgoverning nations of our day. For this is in effect an admission of unripeness, of immaturity of thought with respect to the supreme concerns of human action. We live in a period of political disillusionment. The tree of political liberty, watered with blood and tears, has brought forth many bitter fruits. In our disappointments we overlook what the struggle for self-government has done for those who have participated in it. At least it has chastened the unbridled imagination of man; it has developed a sense of realities; it has brought a certain maturity of mind as its outcome.

Now, when not only the Bernhardis but the Bismarcks and the von Bülows tell us that the Germans are marked with an absence of political sense and capacity, that they have not the gift of self-government, that they accomplish great things only under the leadings from authority from above, what are they saying except that the Germans, with all their achievements, have missed the one great experience in which the national minds of Great Britain, France, and America have been educated and ripened? With all our defects, is any measure of technical efficiency, of comfortable ease, in a "socialized Germany," a compensation for the absence, I do not say of political

democracy, but of the experience which comes to men only in a struggle to be free and responsible in their moral and social action? Compared with such freedom, the irresponsible freedom of inner consciousness seems, I repeat, an extension into a modern world of the undisciplined mind of the Middle Ages.

If there be any truth in this conception,and unless there be truth in it, the struggle for democracy lacks intellectual significance, -we have probably the root of the difficulty of mutual understanding as between the German mind and that of other peoples. Politically we do not speak the same language because we do not think the same thoughts. My final word would not be one, however, upon this discouraging note. It is rather a word of hopefulness regarding what has given Americans so much cause for perplexity-the "hyphen" problem. It is natural in a time of emotional stress, and in a time when those of German ancestry find hard things said on all sides about their ancestral land, that German-Americans should indulge in idealization of their older country, should bring forth with emphatic fervor the numerous fine things which current criticism is ignoring, and should in their irritation seek out the weak things in their adopted land and speak with harshness of its institutions. But I cannot believe that any large number of them have remained here without being profoundly influenced by the struggle for responsible and self-respecting common management of common affairs.

War brings with it a recrudescence of the spirit of Romanticism, a reversion to the undisciplined mind, among all peoples. To be in an unsympathetic land, a land which does not understand, is a stimulus to the most tense kind of Romantic fancy. But when the emotional strain passes, there will be an equal reversion to the light of common day, with its usual tasks and the illumination of these tasks by the thought that we are all engaged together in the greatest enterprise which has ever enlisted human thought and emotion: the attainment of the common control of the common interests of beings who live together. Whether German-Americans will then attempt to educate their countrymen at home to an inherent lack in any Kultur of a modern state not based on the principle of self-government, I do not know. 'Tis a consummation devoutly to be wished. But I am confident that all, except a few incurable aliens who merely happen to be

physically among us, will respond with eagerness to any call which Americans who are longer acclimated may issue, to make our own experiment in responsible freedom more of a reality. And this response is, after all, the final test of loyalty to American institutions.

THE GOSPEL OF DUTY AND ITS IMPLICATIONS

JOHN DEWEY

[From German Philosophy and
Politics, 1915]

The gospel of duty has an invigorating ring. It is easy to present it as the most noble and sublime of all moral doctrines. What is more worthy of humanity, what better marks the separation of mar. from brute, than the wili to subordinate selfish desire and individual inclination to the commands of stern and lofty duty? And if the idea of command (which inevitably goes with the notion of duty) carries a sinister suggestion of legal authority, pains and penalties and of subservience to an external authority who issues the commands, Kant seems to have provided a final corrective in insisting that duty is self imposed by the higher, supranatural self upon the lower, empirical self, by the rational self upon the self of passions and inclinations. German philosophy is attached to antitheses and their reconciliation to a higher synthesis. The Kantian principle of Duty is a striking case of the reconciliation of the seemingly conflicting ideas of freedom and authority.

Unfortunately, however, the balance cannot be maintained in practice. Kant's faithful logic compels him to insist that the concept of duty is empty and formal. It tells men that to do their duty is the supreme law of action, but is silent as to what men's duties specifically are. Kant, moreover, insists, as he is in logic bound to do, that the motive which measures duty is wholly inner; it is purely a matter of inner consciousness. To admit that consequences can be taken into account in deciding what duty is in a particular case would be to make concessions to the empirical and sensible world which are fatal to the scheme. The combination of these two features of pure internality and pure formalism leads, in a world where men's acts take place wholly in the external and empirical region, to serious consequences.

The dangerous character of these consequences may perhaps be best gathered indirectly by means of a quotation.

"While the French people in a savage revolt against a spiritual and secular despotism had broken their chains and proclaimed their rights, another quite different revolution was working in Prussia-the revolution of duty. The assertion of the rights of the individual leads ultimately to individual irresponsibility and to a repudiation of the State. Immanuel Kant, the founder of the critical philosophy, taught, in opposition to this view, the gospel of moral duty, and Scharnhorst grasped the idea of universal military service. By calling upon the individual to sacrifice property and life for the good of the community, he gave the clearest. expression to the idea of the State, and created a sound basis on which claims to individual rights might rest." 1

The sudden jump, by means of only a comma, from the gospel of moral duty to universal military service is much more logical than the shock which it gives to an American reader would indicate. I do not mean, of course, that Kant's teaching was the cause of Prussia's adoption of universal military service and of the thorough-going subordination of individual happiness and liberty of action to that capitalized entity, the State. But I do mean that when the practical political situation called for military service in order to support and expand the existing state, the gospel of a Duty devoid of content naturally lent itself to the consecration and idealization of such specific duties as the national order might prescribe. The sense of duty must get its subject matter somewhere, and unless subjectivism was to revert to anarchic or romantic individualism (which is hardly in the spirit of obedience to authoritative law) its appropriate subject matter lies in the commands of a superior. Concretely what the State commands is the congenial outer filling of a purely inner sense of duty. That the despotism of Frederick the Great and of the Hohenzollerns who remained true to his policy was at least that hitherto unknown thing, an enlightened despotism, made the identification easier. Individuals have at all times, in epochs of stress, offered their supreme sacrifice to their country's good. In Germany this sacrifice in times of peace as well as of war has been systematic

1 Bernhardi, Germany and the Next War, pp. 63-64.

ally reinforced by an inner mystic sense of a Duty elevating men to the plane of the universal and eternal.

In short, the sublime gospel of duty has its defects. Outside of the theological and the Kantian moral traditions, men have generally agreed that duties are relative to ends. Not the obligation, but some purpose, some good, which the fulfillment of duty realizes, is the principle of morals. The business of reason is to see that the end, the good, for which one acts is a reasonable one-that is to say, as wide and equitable in its working out as the situation permits. Morals which are based upon consideration of good and evil consequences not only allow, but imperiously demand the exercise of a discriminating intelligence. A gospel of duty separated from empirical purposes and results tends to gag intelligence. It substitutes for the work of reason displayed in a wide and distributed survey of consequences in order to determine where duty lies an inner consciousness, empty of content, which clothes with the form of rationality the demands of existing social authorities. A consciousness which is not based upon and checked by consideration of actual results upon human welfare is none the less socially irresponsible because labeled Reason.

The passage (from Bernhardi) quoted. earlier puts the German principle of duty in opposition to the French principle of rights a favorite contrast in German thought. Men like Jeremy Bentham also found the Revolutionary Rights of Man doctrinaire and conducing to tyranny rather than to freedom. These Rights were a priori, like Duty, being derived from the supposed nature or essence of man, instead of being adopted as empirical expedients to further progress and happiness. But the conception of duty is one-sided, expressing command on one side and obedience on the other, while rights are at least reciprocal. Rights are social and sociable in accord with the spirit of French philosophy. Put in a less abstract form than the revolutionary theory stated them, they are things to be discussed and measured. They admit of more and less, of compromise and adjustment. So also does the characteristic moral contribution of English thought-intelligent self-interest. This is hardly an ultimate idea. But at least it evokes a picture of merchants bargaining, while the categorical imperative calls up the drill sergeant. Trafficking ethics, in which each gives up some

thing that he wants to get something which he wants more, is not the noblest kind of morals, but at least it is socially responsible as far as it goes. "Give so that it may be given to you in return" has at least some

tendency to bring men together; it promotes agreement. It requires deliberation and discussion. This is just what the authoritative voice of a superior will not tolerate; it is the one unforgivable sin.

INTERNATIONAL HONOR

DAVID LLOYD GEORGE

[From an Address delivered September
19, 1914]

I have come here this afternoon to talk to my fellow countrymen about this great war and the part we ought to take in it. I feel my task is easier after we have been listening to the greatest battle-song in the world.1

There is no man in this room who has always regarded the prospects of engaging in a great war with greater reluctance, with greater repugnance, than I have done throughout the whole of my political life. There is no man, either inside or outside of this room, more convinced that we could not have avoided it without national dishonor. I am fully alive to the fact that whenever a nation has been engaged in any war she has always invoked the sacred name of honor. Many a crime has been committed in its name; there are some crimes being committed now. But, all the same, national honor is a reality, and any nation that disregards it is doomed.

Why is our honor as a country involved in this war? Because, in the first place, we are bound in an honorable obligation to defend the independence, the liberty, the integrity of a small neighbor that has lived peaceably, but she could not have compelled us, because she was weak. The man who declines to discharge his debt because his cred-. itor is too poor to enforce it is a blackguard. We entered into this treaty, a solemn treaty, a full treaty, to defend Belgium and her integrity. Our signatures are attached to the document. Our signatures do not stand alone there. This was not the only country to defend the integrity of Belgiem. Russia, France, Austria, and Prussia-they are all there. Why did they not perform the obli

1 "The Men of Harlech."

gation? It is suggested that if we quote this treaty it is purely an excuse on our part. It is our low craft and cunning, just to cloak our jealousy of a superior civilization we are attempting to destroy. Our answer is the action we took in 1870. What was that? Mr. Gladstone was then Prime Minister. Lord Granville, I think, was then Foreign Secretary. I have never heard it laid to their charge that they were ever jingo.

What did they do in 1870? That Treaty Bond was this: We called upon the belligerent Powers to respect that treaty. We called upon France; we called upon Germany. At that time, bear in mind, the greatest danger to Belgium came from France and not from Germany. We intervened to protect Belgium against France exactly as we are doing now to protect her against Germany. We are proceeding exactly in the same way. We invited both the belligerent Powers to state that they had no intention of violating Belgian territory. What was the answer given by Bismarck? He said it was superfluous to ask Prussia such a question in view of the treaties in force. France gave a similar answer. We received the thanks at that time from the Belgian people for our intervention in a very remarkable document. .This is the document addressed by the municipality of Brussels to Queen Victoria after that intervention:

"The great and noble people over whose destinies you preside have just given a further proof of their benevolent sentiments towards this country. The voice of the English nation has been heard above the din of arms. It has asserted the principles of justice and right. Next to the unalterable attachment of the Belgian people to their independence, the strongest sentiment which fills their hearts is that of an imperishable gratitude to the people of Great Britain."

That was in 1870. Mark what follows. Three or four days after that document of thanks the French Army was wedged up