“Wer Reitet So Spät Durch Nacht und Wind? — Dass Ist der Vater Mit Seinem Kind” (Erlkönig)
Not only the father and his sick child ride storm-foundered and lost through night, with the phantom king steadily gaining upon both: the frantic, over-driven brute they ride should also be conscious of approaching doom. But is it?
We may take their steed to be the nation of the royal fugitives, and wonder when Germany—a kingdom whose native qualities had won such ample recognition among her elder sisters on the road to civilization—will awaken into consciousness of her accursed load and perceive that the Hohenzollerns ride only to death. They started on their gallop when Bismarck fell, and now the end is in sight.
Great must be the subjugation before a practical people can reach this pass, or still fail to perceive, if on a material basis only, where the legend of world-power and world-trade has brought them. As sleepwalkers they pursued their dream and have not yet awakened to see where now they stand. Still they believe the issue undetermined; still is it hidden from them that their might is broken, that roughly half their foreign trade, which lay with the Allies, has vanished. Only ignorance and the tradition of servility postpone inevitable revolution.
Of Germany’s evil-genius and arch-enemy, now far advanced on the road that leads to his destruction, an illuminating picture has just been flashed to us. One who was long a publicist in the capitals of Europe has spoken of “Things I remember,” and he quotes a German author—a woman—who spoke thus of the “War Lord” before the war. None is a more shrewd and subtle student of character than a woman, when she holds an object worthy of her study.
“I can assure you that he extirpates, as of fell purpose, every independent character, root and branch. Think of the number of poor devils in prison for the crime of lèse majesté, not one instance of which he has ever pardoned; while there is not a case of a man having killed his opponent in a duel, however disgraceful might have been its cause, whom he has not pardoned, or at least remitted the sentence. Never has a monarch encouraged Byzantine servility to such a degree as this man. No sunbeam but it must radiate from him; no incense but it must fill his nostrils.”
May Germany use her waking hour to be rid forever of this archaic incubus; and if, at the end, she still cries for the domination of Prussia, then it is to be hoped that, when they have won the war, the Allies will save her from her own blindness and themselves perform the act of liberation.
EDEN PHILLPOTTS.