H.L. Mencken

Baltimore Evening Sun/

§1.

In one direction, at least, the pious gentlemen who snuffle and blubber for poor, dear old England in the American newspapers have proved beyond the shadow of a doubt that the Germans who now go through Europe are frightfully immoral. Enough, gents! Let so much be considered the reading of the minutes! As a volunteer attorney, not entirely unshystical, for Kultur, I admit the charge, give a cheer for the crime, and (falling into characteristic and lamentable vulgarity) spit into the learned judge’s eye. For that compound of sentimentality and hypocrisy which passes for a Herrenmoral in the United States—for the sweet mush which nourishes and delights chautauquans, Sunday-school superintendents, “leading lawyers,” collectors for the Belgians, newspaper editorial writers, viewers with alarm, professional patriots, right-thinkers, forward-lookers—for that sort of ethical sugar-teat the modern German has only contempt and derision. He knows that is not true and he knows that it will not work, and so he does not trouble himself to examine into it further. He is not interested in the moral theories of old women in pantaloons. To borrow a Nietzschean phrase, he hands them over to statistics and the devil.

§2.

The Anglo-Saxon, of course, finds it hard to believe that any race pretending to civilization should reject the slobbering ethic that he is taught by his schoolmarms and his newspapers, just as he finds it difficult to believe that any race should reject his childish faith in mobs, majorities and political messiahs. Worse, he finds it downright impossible, and so he arrives at his doctrine that the German is an immoral man and will go to hell when he dies. . . . Almost a platitude! The things that the Anglo-Saxon looks on with the highest veneration are precisely the things that the German laughs at as silly and even obscene. And the things that the German puts at the head of his list of virtues are the things that the Anglo-Saxon regards with the most bilious suspicion. Our ideal morality, which we believe in firmly, even though we make a sorry mess of practicing it, is the anæmic offspring of the slave morality of the post-exodus Jews. The German’s ideal morality, which he practices assiduously, even if he does not openly defend it, is a sturdy reassertion of the master morality of the Periclean Greeks.

§3.

I hope I need not explain to readers of the Sunpaper, the Saturday Evening Post and Dr. Ayers’ Almanac what the difference is between these two things. Call it a difference between romanticism and realism, between the moving pictures and laparatomy, and you will come very close to defining it. The distinguishing mark of a slave-morality is that it posits a condition that does not, in point of fact, exist, and deduces from it a program of conduct that is impossible of realization. The essential thing about a master-morality is that it subordinates all theories and aspirations, however tempting, however beautiful, to the demonstrable and immovable facts. In other words, the first is a revolt against reality, an attempt to escape the bitterness of life, and the second is a bold acceptance of reality, regardless of its pains. The patron of a slave-morality gets a lot of sweet, solemn pleasure out of contemplating his own righteousness and the gross, inexplicable sinfulness of others, but he is greatly handicapped by his virtue when the call is for rough fighting. The patron of a master-morality, on the contrary, goes out and grabs the goods.

§4.

The war well exemplifies the workings of the two schemes. The English, having convinced themselves by a consultation with their official soothsayers that they have a monopoly of the right, take refuge behind the idiotic and moral maxim that right makes might, and deduce from it the moral commandment that all righteous men must be willing to battle for the right,—i. e., for England—at the peril of their own lives, and the fond expectation that enough of them will come forward to make it prevail. The Germans embrace no such affectionate delusion. They are just as firmly convinced that they are right as the English are (and perhaps with as little ground), but they see no causal relation between right and might. They believe, on the contrary, that the two are quite distinct—as much so, indeed, as patriotism and beauty—and that in war it is not right, but might, that prevails. Accordingly, they address themselves with a stupendous singleness of aim to the augmentation and organization of their might, convinced that the right will be easily taken care of if there is enough might behind it. And inasmuch as the might that they fight for in this case seems to be the most fundamental and impeccable of all forms of right, they cheerfully offer it the sacrifice of every lesser form of right, and of all rights as well. It is right for the German people to aspire to a place in the sun; it is right for them to seize it if it is denied them by envious moralists across the channel. It is also right for the Belgians to defend their god-forsaken country, and for the individual German to desire his personal safety and comfort, and for the English to scream for the police when a pistol is pointed at their heads—but all these lower forms of right must yield to the higher. Germany is strong, and fearless, and ruthless, and resolute. Ergo, Germany must, shall and will prevail.

§5.

Am I forgetting here the almost daily reports of harangues by the German Kaiser, explaining the German case on other and antagonistic grounds? In particular, am I forgetting his alleged Gott mit uns theory—i. e., the theory that Germany is invincible because she is right, that the Lord in on the side of the pure in heart, that virtue is its own exceeding great reward? Nay; I am not forgetting it, nor am I bothered by it. A favorite American superstition to the contrary, the Kaiser is not Germany, nor are his private theological ideas of more than academic interest to the men who actually run the empire. He may be, for all I know, a Christian Scientist, and pay some frowsy old healer a weekly fee for launching malicious animal magnetism at King George. And he may, on the other hand, be a discreet politician, and know exactly what sort of ethic is most palatable to Socialists and bauern. Or he may be trying to spoof Dr. Wilson, that irrepressible moralist. Whatever the fact, his lyrical performances after fatiguing banquets are not to be accepted as disproof of what is written so hugely upon the firmament of heaven, that all who run may read. The German theory is visible in the German practice. Germany is the first modern state that has dared to do “wrong” openly, and to admit it frankly. And that “wrong,” by the force of arms, has now been made right.

§6.

Of course, even the Germans find their transvaluation of the old moral values rather uncomfortable, and to large numbers of them, I dare say, it is very painful. A touch of mediævalism is still in them. Perhaps it explains, far better than the explanations just ventured, the occasional snorting and posturing of the Kaiser, not to mention the laborious apologias of magnificoes farther down the scale. The diplomats and politicians of a country are not its leaders: they are its followers and hangers-on. What such a mountebank as Colonel Roosevelt discovers and announces tomorrow will be what all truly reflective Americans had already rejected year before last. Dr. Wilson, in his public utterances, offers many examples of this intellectual mortmain among public characters. For example, he once announced in a public address “the bankruptcy of science”: thirty-odd years after Bishop Wilberforce had announced it and rather more than 20 years after Wilberforce’s last follower had prudently resolved to mention it no more. . . .

The spirit of a people is not to be sought in the whooping and conjuring of such gentlemen, nor, for that matter, in the delusions and manias of the mob to which they address their sagacity. Under a pure mobocracy, such as we enjoy in the United States, it may be said with some degree of truth that the belief (i. e., superstition) of the farm-hand is the policy of the nation. But this is by no means true of nations that have attained to a higher degree of governmental sanity and efficiency, and it is surely not true of Germany. The greatness of that country resides in the vast power wielded by its actually superior men, in the strength and intellectual daring of its aristocracy of competence and sound knowledge. To confuse that ruling aristocracy with its liveried servants and policemen, the Junkers, as all English and American chanters upon the war do, is to commit an error so gross that it is ludicrous. At least a dozen of the men who have made the Germany of today, and who, in the last analysis, determine and dominate, not only its political policies but its underlying national ethics, are actually Jews. Consider, for example, Ballin and Rathenau. . . .

§7.

But I argue merely to kill time. The facts speak for themselves. The great service that the Germans do to civilization is not in their destruction of the old delusion—so terrible to the romantic!—of English invulnerability, but in their upsetting and knocking to pieces of the slick, slimy, canting hypocrisy that has passed among the English for rectitude for two centuries past. We Americans have been poisoned by that abhorrent fungus, too; unless we get rid of it it will destroy us as it is destroying the English. A brighter, cleaner day dawns. The Germans offer the world an ethic that, whatever its harshness, is at least based upon truth—an ethic that a sane man can cherish to his bosom without feeling as filthy a sniveler and charlatan as the Archbishop of Canterbury. If, to set it up, whole principalities and races of men have to die, the world will still be getting it at no more than the immemorial market rate for such commodities. Blood is not only the price of liberty; it is the price of every other move upward out of darkness, credulity, fear and degradation. Even the right to vote—i. e., the right to admit one’s equality with City Councilmen, curve-greasers, and horse jockeys—was obtained only by the butchery of thousands, and perhaps even millions. Is every American, today, his own pope, determining precisely what is authentic in Holy Writ and what is mere misapprehension and piffle? Then a lot of pleasant fellows had to die for it. Germany, as Bismarck once remarked to his barber, was made by blood and iron. So was the rest of Christendom. So was civilization. . . . On with the massacres! Up, there, catchpolls! Ten thousand head of Armenians!