matic service outwards and the Parliamentary activity inwards developed in two divergent directions. Each became in fundamental feeling alien to, and contemptuous of, the other. Life fretted itself to soreness in a form that it had not developed out of itself. After Thermidor, France succumbed to the rule of the Bourse, mitigated from time to time by the setting up of a military dictature (1800, 1851, 1871, 1918). Bismarck's creation was in fundamentals of a dynastic nature, with a parliamentary component of decidedly subordinate importance, and in it the inner friction was so strong as to monopolize the available political energy, and finally, after 1916, to exhaust the organism itself. The Army had its own history, with a great tradition going back to Frederick William I,[1] and so also had the administration. In them was the source of Socialism as one kind of true political "training," diametrically opposed to the English[2] but, like it, a full expression of strong race-quality. The officer and the official were trained high. But the necessity of breeding up a corresponding political type was not recognized. Higher policy was handled "administratively" and minor policy was hopeless squabbling. And so army and administration finally became aims in themselves, after Bismarck's disappearance had removed the one man who even without a supply of real politicians to back him (this tradition alone could have produced) was big enough to treat both as tools of policy. When the issue of the World War removed the upper layers, nothing remained but parties educated for opposition only, and these brought the activity of Government down to a level hitherto unknown in any Civilization.
But to-day Parliamentarism is in full decay. It was a continuation of the Bourgeois Revolution by other means, the revolution of the Third Estate of 1789 brought into legal form and joined with its opponent the Dynasty as one governmental unit. Every modern election, in fact, is a civil war carried on by ballot-box and every sort of spoken and written stimulus, and every great party-leader is a sort of Napoleon. In this form, meant to remain infinitely valid, which is peculiar to the Western Culture and would be nonsensical and impossible in any other, we discern once more our characteristic tendency to infinity, historical foresight[3] and forethought, and will to order the distant future, in this case according to bourgeois standards of the present.
All the same, Parliamentarism is not a summit as the absolute Polis and the Baroque State were summits, but a brief transition — namely, between the
- ↑ The reassertion of this tradition after the emergency-army of the Wars of Liberation (1812-15) had dispersed into the body of the community is a remarkable story, in which military and political standpoints cannot be separated. See Vidal de la Blache, La Régéneration de l'Armée Prusse (1910), Ch. vi. — Tr.
- ↑ See Preussentum und Sozialismus, pp. 40, et seq.
- ↑ The genesis of the Roman Tribunate was a blind incident, the happy consequences of which no one really foresaw. Western Constitutions, on the contrary, have been thoroughly thought out and their effects precisely calculated — whether the calculation proved to be correct or incorrect, the care is undeniable.
