Ideals of Liberty.—When discussing the question of liberty and the ideals of political freedom, it is safer to consult the recognized authorities on ancient and modern history, famous students of constitutional affairs, than to accept the dictum of political opportunists whose judgments and pronouncements vary with the shift of the wind.

The World War over night transformed the stupid, slow-going, dull-witted German, the “Hans Breitmann” of Leland, and the familiar “Fritz and his little dog Schneider,” into a world figure of adroitness and supernatural finesse in all the arts of deception. From a sodden, beer-guzzling, sauerkraut-eating Falstaff, he was suddenly changed into a finished product of macchiavelian cleverness, or into a knight errant charging around the world to suppress other people’s liberty, and the embodiment of all that stands for autocracy.

While we were at war a good deal of this sort of figure painting was tolerable; but long before we entered the war, it was dangerous for the plain American citizen to express any view that did not describe every German as a Hun and Boche. Yet all the time our libraries were littered with the Latin classics, with Hume, Montesquieu, Guizot and other famous authors, who actually contradicted this verdict of Rudyard Kipling and his followers, and who, we presume, may now be safely taken from the shelf and opened without exposing one to the risk of being prosecuted for high treason, since they speak rather well of our late enemies.

“Liberty,” said the Roman poet Lucanus, “is the German’s birthright.” “It is a privilege,” wrote the Roman historian Florus, “which nature has granted to the Germans, and which the Greeks, with all their art, knew not how to obtain.” Hume, the great English historian, says: “If our part of the world maintain sentiments of liberty, honor, equity and valor, superior to the rest of mankind, it owes these advantages to the seed implanted by those generous barbarians.” “Liberty,” observed Montesquieu, “that lovely thing, was discovered in the wild forests of Germany.” And Guizot, the French historian and statesman, in his “History of Civilization” (LectureII), makes this observation:

It was the rude barbarians of Germany who introduced this sentiment of personal independence, this love of personal liberty, into European civilization; it was unknown among the Romans, it was unknown in the Christian Church; it was unknown in nearly all the civilizations of antiquity. The liberty that we meet with in ancient civilizations is political liberty; it is the liberty of the citizen. We are indebted for it to the barbarians who introduced it into European civilization, in which, from its first rise it has played so considerable a part and has produced such lasting and beneficial results that it must be regarded as one of the fundamental principles.

Mr. Walter S.McNeill tells us that “in some respects the German (Constitution) is more democratic than our own,” while Professor Burgess (author of the standard work, “Political Science and Comparative Constitutional Law”) teaches us that “of the three European constitutions which we are examining, only that of Germany contains in any degree the guarantees of individual liberty which the Constitution of the United States so richly affords” (BookII, chapter1, page179, Vol.1), whereas his opinion of England, as expressed in “The European War of1914,” is that “there is no longer a British Constitution according to the American idea of constitutional government.... In this only true sense of constitutional government, the British Government is a despotism.... The Russian economic and political systems have more points of likeness with the British than is usually conceived.”

Frank Harris (“England or Germany?” p.30) writes: “Great Britain is among the least free of modern nations. Her chief titles to esteem belong to the past.” Prof. Yandell Henderson (Yale): “Modern Germany is as unlike the Germany of Frederick the Great, out of which it has developed, as America of to-day is unlike the America of the stagecoach.”

Germany cannot be at once the country painted by Mr.Wilson in1917 and the country he painted in1919. In his speech before the A.F. ofL. convention in November, 1917, he said:

“All the intellectual men of the world went to school to her. As a university man I have been surrounded by men trained in Germany; men who have resorted to Germany because nowhere else could they get such thorough and searching training, particularly in the principles of science and the principles that underlie modern material achievement. Her men of science had made her industries perhaps the most competent industries of the world, and the label ‘Made in Germany’ was a guarantee of good workmanship and sound material.”

In his address to the French Academy of Moral and Political Science, Paris, May10, 1919, the same speaker said:

“A great many of my colleagues in American university life got their training, even in political science, as so many men in civil circles did, in German universities.... And it has been a portion of my effort to disengage the thought of American university teachers from the misguided instruction which they had received on this side of the sea.”

And this is the tribute he pays to Prussia in his chapter on Prussian government in his “The State:”

“Prussia has achieved a greater perfection in administrative organization than any other European State.... The modern Prussian constitution is one which may be said to rest on a scientific basis.”