Proud Tower - Barbara W. Tuchman [154]
The Kaiserin remarked that she had not seen her husband so annoyed for a long time as over the sudden intrusion—into a domain he considered his own—of “Nicky,” the Czar, whom he was accustomed to patronize and advise in voluble letters in English signed “Willy.” Whether or not he had planned some similar statement from Jerusalem, the real bite was, as his friend Count Eulenburg said, that he “simply can’t stand someone else coming to the front of the stage.”
Assuming at a glance that the proposal was one for “general disarmament,” and immediately seeing the results in personal terms, the Kaiser dashed off a telegram to Nicky. Imagine, he reproached, “a Monarch holding personal command of his Army, dissolving his regiments sacred with a hundred years of history … and handing over his towns to Anarchists and Democracy.” Nevertheless he felt sure the Czar would be praised for his humanitarian proposal, “the most interesting and surprising of this century! Honor will henceforth be lavished upon you by the whole world; even should the practical part fail through difficulties of detail.” He littered the margins of ensuing correspondence with Aha!’s and !!’s and observations varying from the astute to the vulgar, the earliest being the not unperceptive thought, “He has put a brilliant weapon into the hands of our Democrats and Opposition.” At one point he compared the proposal to the Spartans’ message demanding that the Athenians agree not to rebuild their walls; at another he suddenly scribbled the rather apt query, “What will Krupp pay his workers with?”
Germany did not have the motive and the cue for peace that Russia had: straitened circumstances. Under-developed industry was not a German problem. When Muraviev in Berlin told Count Eulenburg that the guiding idea behind the Russian proposal was that the yearly increases would finally bring the nations to the point of non possumus, he could not have chosen a worse argument. Non possumus was not in the German vocabulary. Germany was bursting with vigor and bulging with material success. After the unification of 1871, won by the sword in the previous decade of wars, prosperity had come with a rush, as it had in the United States after the Civil War. Energies were let loose on the development of physical resources. Germany in the nineties was enjoying the first half of a twenty-five-year period in which her national income doubled, population increased by 50 per cent, railroad-track mileage by 50 per cent, cities sprang up, colonies were acquired, giant industries took shape, wealth accumulated from their enterprises and the rise in employment kept pace. Albert Ballin’s steamship empire multiplied its tonnage sevenfold and its capital tenfold in this period. Emil Rathenau developed the electrical industry which quadrupled the number of its workers in ten years. I. G. Farben created aniline dyes; Fritz Thyssen governed a kingdom of coal, iron and steel in the Ruhr. As a result of a new smelting process making possible the utilization of the phosphoric iron ore of Lorraine, Germany’s production of coal and steel by 1898 had increased four times since 1871 and now surpassed Britain’s. Germany’s national income in that period had doubled, although it was still behind Britain’s, and measured per capita, was but two-thirds of Britain’s. German banking houses opened branches around the world, German salesmen sold German goods from Mexico to Baghdad.
German universities and technical schools were the most