/7T:
By Pouttney Bigetoiv
The German Emperor and His Eastern Neighbors. 1890
Paddles and Politics
A Canoe Voyage from the Black Forest to the Black Sea
Border Land of Czar and Kaiser
Studies on Both Sides of the Polish Frontier
Children of the Nations
A Study in Modern Colonization
White Man's Africa
A Study of the Different South African States Immedi- ately after the Jameson Raid
The German Struggle for Liberty
A History, 1806-1848, in 4 Vols. Prussian Memories
Genseric : King of the Vandals and First Prussian Kaiser
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GENSERIC
KING OF THE VANDALS
AND FIRST PRUSSIAN KAISER
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BY
POULTNEY BIGELOW, M.A., F.R.G.S,
AUTHOR OF "A HISTORY OF THE GERMAN STRUGGLE FOR LIBERTY," " PRUSSIAN MEMORIES," ETC.
G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS
NEW YORK AND LONDON
Ube Iknicfeerbocfeer press
1918
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COPYRIGHT, 1918
BY POULTNEY BIGELOW
Second Impression
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tTbe ftnicfcerbocfeer press, Hew HJorft
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THE AUTHOR OF
ELIZABETH AND HER GERMAN GARDEN
". . . It is now more than a quarter of a century since I had the privilege of meeting you on the shores of the Baltic — the Vandal habitat. Each of your books I have read— many of them three times — one or two so often as to have lost count. In your pages I have found not merely the rhetorical graces that charm the intellect, but also a spiritual appreciation of Prussian character that no historian can afford to ignore; for nowhere else will be found the truth presented more fearlessly or with finer critical sense."
P. B.
INTRODUCTORY
HP HERE are no surprises for him who studies history at its source. When, therefore, in the summer of 1914, the whole civilised world burst into a cry of indignation at Prussian barbarity, it proved that the world at large was ignorant of history or rather had been inoculated with edu- cational serum "made in Germany." Prussia in 1914 did only what was expected of her by those who knew her past. Unfortunately, the Ameri- can Press, in common with that of England, has for twenty years turned a persistently deaf ear to the many warnings that came from over the Rhine; and under cover of an almost universal pro-Ger- man and Pacifistic propaganda, William II. pre- pared a raid upon the trade-relations of the world, unparalleled for ferocity, for vastness, and for efficiency in diabolical details.
During the quarter of a century through which
vi Introductory
he honoured me with marks of his favour — I had almost said his confidence — he posed as a Prince of Peace. But this was only a mask which he dropped so soon as he had completed the Kiel Canal and had completed also his programme of national expansion.
Our Pacifists did not — or would not — see the new Prussian menace, and when those who knew sought to point it out, every American University became suddenly a centre of German propaganda, where Doctors of Philosophy from Goettingen, Heidel- berg, and Berlin, preached loudly and fervently the gospel of a Kultur Kaiser who loved America dearly and hated only war.
When William II. ascended the throne (1888) he secured for me permission to use the secret Archives, not only of the State but also of the great General Staff. Here I gathered at first hand materials for my History of the German Struggle ( 1 806-48) . The first volume was published in 1 896, the year in which William threw his mask away.
He thanked me for the copy which I sent him, but expressed disappointment, not to say anger, at the manner in which I had pictured his resting-in-
Introductory vii
God-legendarily-glorious ancestor, Frederick Will- iam III., who is rescued from oblivion only by having had for a wife the saintly Queen Luise. William II. did not like my treatment of Prussian history, nor can I say whether he expected to find in me an honorary historiographer to the Hohen- zollern Court,— to praise the present war — to justify the rape of Belgium — the murder of Edith Cavell and Captain Fryatt, and the nameless horrors incident to the sinking of the Lusiianial
Important is the fact that historical text-books are, in Prussia, treated as political pamphlets ; and that professors of the German University distort the records in their own archives in order to glorify the reigning dynasty.
In 1913, Germany celebrated with much en- thusiasm the Centennial of her Liberation from Napoleon. The present Crown Prince was made President of the National Committee; a massive monument of mediocre taste was dedicated at Leipzig; and the most famous of local dramatists was ordered to produce in Breslau a play that should fire the Prussian heart and glorify the reign- ing House.
viii Introductory
The play ran for two days — just long enough for news of its character to reach Potsdam and secure the attention of the Kaiser. Then came an order that it be at once suppressed.
The simple German rubbed his eyes and scratched his ears ! The. millions who had not seen it now rushed to buy a copy; and, of course I did the same — happening to be just then in Bavaria. No reason had been given for the summary act of censorship and the more the people read, the less did they understand.
The dramatist had detailed with Wagnerian wearisomeness the services of all the great men who had helped in 1813 to throw off the yoke of Napoleon. It was indeed a dreary drama and would have been damned for that reason alone in any other country. But I had been Imperial guest at many patriotic plays with five acts of flatuous prolixity; for instance, The Quitzows, where even the military escort yawned at flattery that would have seemed gross even in a Byzantine court. Knowing then that mere length and dulness could not be a blemish in Berlin eyes, I was not long in detecting the reason for the play's with-
Introductory ix
drawal. To be sure, Germany was glorified and German patriots were praised; but the King of Prussia, the alleged fount ainhead of all glory and goodness, was not even mentioned. There was the Use majestel It was that crime that made courtiers die suddenly in the days of Nero — the crime of not applauding loudly enough! The dramatist of 1913 while he dared not criticize his Kaiser shrank from language that would make himself ridiculous. He therefore remained silent and, socially speaking, signed his own death warrant.
Need I say more to explain the state of modern Germany — the mental and spiritual transforma- tion of a whole people through an educational pro- cess that has no parallel in any country of modern or ancient times? We of America and England glory in our free schools and, when I was a boy, Prussia also regarded her educational system as the bulwark of national independence. But let us be warned in time. Schools are powerful engines for good when guided by those who love their country, seek the truth, and develop in the children the love of justice and liberty. But
x Introductory
when this great national force falls into the hands of a disloyal clergy who takes orders from a foreign potentate, it makes little difference whether he reside on the banks of the Havel or the Tiber — the future of our country is in peril, and the weapons forged for the defence of liberty become instru- ments of tyranny. Genseric lives today in Potsdam; and in successive reincarnations he will march his armies forth to harass the frontiers of civilisation. It is for us to study his career; to study the Prussian machine shops; to learn from the enemy and thus prepare ourselves to meet his attacks — not only today in this war of wars, but for so long as there are vandals and Huns on the confines of our civilisation.
P. B.
MALDEN-ON-HUDSON, N. Y.f
Shakespeare's Birthday, 1918.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PACK
I. — HABITAT OF THE VANDALS — SOME REFLECTIONS ON THEIR ISOLATION — GENSERIC SEEKS A PLACE IN THE SUN i
II. — PROGRESS OF VANDALS FROM PRUSSIA TO THE PILLARS OF HERCULES — GENSERIC PROFESSES PEACE TO DECEIVE HIS ENEMIES . . 9
III. — BONIFACIUS HELPS GENSERIC — His CREDULITY — FRIENDSHIP OF ST. AUGUSTINE — DEFEATED IN BATTLE — FORGIVEN BY PLACIDIA — GEN- SERIC METHODS COMPARED WITH THOSE OF WILLIAM II. — DEATH OF ST. AUGUSTINE ... 14
IV. — HIPPO-REGIUS INVESTED BY GEN- SERIC— How HE WAS HELPED BY PACIFISTS AND OTHER Dis-
LOYALS— SACK OF THE ClTY . . 25
V. — GENSERIC AND FREDERICK II. — THE WOMEN WHOM THEY HATED — PLA- CIDIA, HER HUSBANDS AND HER TRAVELS — VANDAL OFFERS OF PEACE — CARTHAGE SURPRISED AND HELD AS THE CAPITAL OF THE VANDAL EMPIRE . . . .31 x!
xii Contents
CHAPTER PAGE
VI. — PULCHERIA, EMPRESS OF THE EAST — HER COURT OF PRIESTS AND EUNUCHS — PACIFISM AND PAPACY — GENSERIC AT CARTHAGE PLANS THE PILLAGE OF ROME. SEA SU- PREMACY THEN AND NOW . . 38
VII.— CAREER OF ALARIC — PILLAGE OF GREECE AND ROME — AIDED BY CHRISTIANS — END OF ALARIC . 44
VIII. — ATTILA AND MARTIN LUTHER AT EISENACH — INVASION OF GAUL BY THE HUNS — SAINTS AND SOL- DIERS— FINAL DEFEAT OF THE GERMANS AT CHALONS . . 52
IX. — ATTILA RETIRES AND REAPPEARS AT AQUILEIA — HUNS AND GERMAN KULTUR — DEATH AND FUNERAL OF ATTILA 60
X. — GENSERIC IN MODERN GERMANY — COLONIZATION THEN AND NOW — BUILDING OF VANDAL NAVY — SEA RAIDS — AND WHY THE ROMAN EMPIRE DID so LITTLE . . 69
XI. — SACK OF ROME BY GENSERIC— Eu- DOXIA SEIZED AND DEPORTED — ONE OF HER DAUGHTERS MARRIED TO THE CROWN PRINCE ... 76
XII. — GENSERIC AS AUGUSTUS — CHRISTI- ANITY AND ITS WARRING CREEDS —
Contents xiii
CHAPTER PACK
GERMAN TRIBES BECOME ARIANS — CONSTANTINE HEAD OF THE CHURCH 84
XIII. — RELIGIOUS WAR IN NORTH AFRICA —
SECTS AND THEIR ORIGIN THEN AND NOW — DONATISTS — MARTYR- DOM OF CYPRIAN — His TRIAL . 92
XIV. — PAGAN AND CHRISTIAN PROCEDURE CONTRASTED — JOHN Huss AND HIS FOLLOWERS— JOHN NEPOMUK . 103
XV. — WILLIAM II. AND GENSERIC AS COLO- NISTS— METZ AND CARTHAGE — EX- PEDITION OF MAJORIAN — DISASTER IN CARTHAGENA — His END — ALSO SOME THOUGHTS ON MAYOR MIT- CHEL AND MAJORIAN . .112
XVI. — RIP VAN WINKLE AND THE SEVEN SLEEPERS OF CHRISTENDOM — PAGAN AND CHRISTIAN ROME — HOLY COAT OF TREVES . .121
XVII. — GENSERIC AND EUDOXIA — HER RES- TORATION — SOME COMMENTS ON HER MOTHER ATHENAIS — FAILURE OF THE SECOND GREAT ARMADA AGAINST CARTHAGE . . .130
XVIII. — PERSECUTION BY GENSERIC— MIRA- CLES OF ST. AUGUSTINE AND ST. STEPHEN — IDOLATRY OF PAGANS AND CHRISTIANS — EFFECT OF AFRI- CAN LUXURY ON THE VANDALS . 140
xiv Contents
CHAPTER PAGE
XIX. — SOME OBSERVATIONS ON THE RISE AND FALL OF EMPIRES — RELATIVE PROGRESS OF PAGANISM AND CHRIS- TIANITY — MAHOMETANISM — BUD- DHISM— HINDOOISM . . . 149
XX. — DEATH AND BURIAL OF GENSERIC — His SON HUNRIC SUCCEEDS — POL- ICY AND MANNER OF PERSECUTION — DEPORTATION OF HERETICAL BISHOPS — TORTURE OF WOMEN . 159
XXI. — BELISARIUS LANDS IN AFRICA — EN- TERS CARTHAGE IN TRIUMPH — Is WELCOMED AS DELIVERER — THE VANDAL ARMY DISPERSED — THE LAST OF THEIR KINGS KILLED — THE USURPER A FUGITIVE . .168
XXII. — GELIMER CAPTURED AND CARRIED TO CONSTANTINOPLE WHERE HE ADORNS THE TRIUMPH OF BELISA- RIUS AND is GENEROUSLY WEL- COMED BY JUSTINIAN . .175
XXIII. — COLONIAL GENSERIC AND COLONIAL PRUSSIA OF TODAY — SOME COM- PARATIVE NOTES — KIAO-CHOW AND PAPUA — END OF PRUSSIAN KAISER- ISM IN NORTHERN AFRICA . .181
CONCLUDING CHAPTER: GENSERIC, WILLIAM
II., AND FREDERICK THE GREAT 198
PREFATORY AND BIBLIOGRAPHICAL
\ X 7HERE shall we dig for the treasures of his- tory? To what sources can I refer the young reader without compelling him to absorb some poison of prejudice along with a refreshing draught? German scholarship has crowded every modern library with a portentous array of alleged authority on every subject that can be put into marketable shape. The German state has subsi- dized her universities and her scholars much as she has her steamship lines and her exporting manufac- turers. Young students have been attracted from every country to become acolytes in the temples of a megalophonous Kultur whose priests are paid agents of a propaganda little suspected outside of the initiate. Our students who have in the past flocked to German universities have had no means of measuring the relative value of national scholar- ship. The schools of France and England have
XV
xvi Prefatory and Bibliographical
done little to meet the Teuton competition — the American B.A. has drifted for his Ph.D. to Leipzig or Munich because it was the easiest, the cheapest t and, so far as he knew, the surest way of achieving an academic reputation afterwards.
Fortune, in the person of a very wise father, enabled me to test not merely the work of my German colleagues, but to measure it pari passu with that of others in the same field; and while I always bear witness to the labour and organi- zation that make of Germany a valuable store- house of patiently tabulated knowledge, the student in search of inspiration as well as truth will find more in a single chapter of Gibbon or Montes- quieu than in a quarto of Treitschke or Dahn. The Prussian has a capacity that is unrivalled in French or English literature for making an interest- ing story obscure and dull. I have learned through many years of hard and patient study that when- ever the same subject has been treated by a Teu- ton scholar and by one of our race, the difference has been akin to that of sunshine penetrating a miasmatic vapour — and the sunshine was not of German origin.
Prefatory and Bibliographical xvii
Therefore, if you turn to German sources for the times of Genseric you will find that acts which we deem savage are palliated. You will find a gentle stream of Prussian propaganda permeating the modern encyclopedias, not merely German and American but English as well. You may consult the much advertised Britannica, alleged to be a product of English scholarship, and find to your amazement that not only is German colour given to many contributions but that even the most important maps are made in Gotha. You will look for the Nan-Schan Mountains at the headwaters of the Hoang Ho on the borders of Mongolia and discover that they have been rebaptized after my quondam friend of Berlin, Baron Richthofen!
Imperial Germany has flooded the world with her pedagogues and pundits much as she has honeycombed the British colonies with her com- mercial travellers and spies. It is hard today to find any cyclopedic work of a popular character that does not betray some form of pro-German plan and purpose. We respected the German scholar of our youth because we deemed him
xviii Prefatory and Bibliographical
honest in spite of his dulness. But he is both dull and dishonest, as we have discovered to our cost ; and this war will have achieved some good if we at last take steps to purge our school text- books, our cyclopedias, and above all our histories, from the interested assistance that we have so largely employed because we thought it was good and it was certainly cheap.
Therefore I refrain from adding to this little book a bibliographic burden such as I have had to bear in the preparation of its few pages. The curious reader can check my statements by con- sulting the well-known books of reference where authorities are quoted. The British Museum has published (1911) a valuable catalogue of the Van- dal coins by Warwick Wroth, and here the student may note the manner in which the Prussians of the fifth and sixth century aped the insignia of Imperial Rome much as did the Hohenzollern of 1871 when crowning himself Kaiser at Versailles. There is a very detailed German biographical dictionary in forty-seven volumes, published by the aid of the Bavarian treasury, which collects all that is known of notable barbarians.
Prefatory and Bibliographical xix
De Guigne's Histoire des Huns, although more than a century old, remains today precious to the student. It is a work that might be con- densed and re-edited in the light of recent events and published under the title: Les Prussiens en Belgique !
And, finally, read Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire — read him several times — note the elevation, the purity, the directness, the music of his well-balanced sentences ; and, above all, note his masterly grasp of a great subject — his judicial attitude and his most un-Prussian humour.
Read carefully a page of Gibbon and then try to read a page of any German history ! One such effort will suffice.
GENSERIG
CHAPTER I
Habitat of the Vandals — Some reflections on their isolation — Genseric seeks a place in the sun
/"^ENSERIC, the first Prussian Kaiser of Europe, was born about four centuries after Christ in that swamp and sand district of Brandenburg where now stands the palace of Potsdam. History is silent on many details of his life and we must therefore venture a guess now and then after the manner of our scientific col- leagues. We select Potsdam as the birthplace of Genseric because of its strategic position between the Baltic and the Elbe, at the centre of water- ways admirably suited to commerce or piracy, and therefore marked by Providence as the resi- dence of Prussian or Vandal kings.
2 Genseric
The barbarian hordes who prowled about the frontiers of civilised Europe in the third, fourth, and fifth centuries differed little from their de- scendants who, fifteen centuries later, swarmed across the Rhine and destroyed sacred monu- ments in France and Belgium. It is difficult to locate in detail the dozens of tribes or nations who occupied the great forest-clad spaces reaching from the mouth of the Elbe along the shores of the Baltic to the Gulf of Finland. Their names shifted with the vicissitudes of war, famine, and pressure of population; and the geographer who studies Northern Germany historically is almost as much puzzled as if seeking to explain the mysterious disappearance of tribes and kingdoms in Africa and on the North American continent. But in general the Prussian Baltic, which in our time furnishes the most docile and prolific sub- jects of the Kaiser, was famed for corresponding reasons in the declining days of the Roman Empire.
Especially true was this of the Potsdam regions where the Vandal had his habitat.
Today the name Vandal is preserved etymologi-
First Prussian Kaiser 3
cally in the language and features of the Vends or Wends who occupy the spongy headwaters of the river Spree and are regarded by the rich burgh- ers of Berlin as a prolific source of wet-nurses. These people speak the language of their Vandal ancestors, thanks to the same sort of geographical isolation as protected the primitive inhabitants of Holland and the founders of the Venetian Repub- lic in the Adriatic lagoons. The racial difference between the Prussian or Vandal type and the civilised type inhabiting the Rhine and Danube basins is very marked to any one who has studied the recruits of the German Army, when massed at the Imperial manoeuvres. The Army Corps of Konigsberg, Danzig, Berlin, Colberg, Stettin, and Frankfort on the Oder are as different ethno- logically from those raised in Cologne or Mayence, Augsburg and Ingolstadt, as a Norwegian sailor from a peasant of Sicily. It has been my fortune to study at first hand the ethnological peculiarities of every regiment in the German army from the French and Belgian frontiers to those of Russia and Bohemia, and however loudly the Berliner may bellow his claims as "Wir Deutsche!" he carries
4 Genseric
in his face and manners the brand of Vandalism — which God has done for the security of the rest of mankind.
All this northern wilderness of sandy flatness, sluggish waterways, and interminable pine-forests offered but few inducements to the cultivated traveller of that time, nor does it offer much more today.
There was some trade between the Baltic bar- barians and civilised Europe in Roman times, notably amber, which was exchanged for metals and fine cloth. The Romans knew the Prussia of that time as we have for centuries known the Dark Continent, from trading round its edges. But civilised Europe learned nothing calculated to awaken a desire for further knowledge. The land was poor, there were no cities worth a siege, there were no mines such as drew Phoenicians to Cornwall. In short, Prussia represented then little more than a vast nursery or recruiting ground of hireling soldiers whom hunger or the prospect of plunder drew from their Baltic habitat to the frontiers of civilisation on the Rhine and the Danube. We must bear in mind that the
First Prussian Kaiser 5
Romans loved luxury and were disposed to let mercenaries do their fighting for them ; there was usually war somewhere on the horizon much as there has been in our time at different points of the great British Empire. What then more natural than that Rome should employ armies of Goths or Huns or Vandals rather than insist upon universal military service amongst her own people? And for a time this method worked fairly well because the German tribes were proud to be in Roman pay, and gloried in victories over rival tribes. It was indeed the perpetual discord of the German barbarians that enabled the courts of Rome and Constantinople to maintain their ancient prestige through merely subsidizing one tribe or nation against another — but such a policy is dangerous in weak hands — as we shall soon see.
Genseric became King of the Vandals when his years about equalled those of his illustrious avatar William II., that is to say, about thirty years of age. It would be interesting to compare their horoscopes, but unfortunately for the science of megalomania we have but guesses to guide us
6 Genseric
here — and my guess makes the birthday of Gen- seric January 2 7th, at the opening of the fateful fifth century of our era.
We behold him now taking command of an army that has for the past twenty-five years been pushing and pillaging southward from the spongy deserts of Northern Prussia to the banks of the Guadalquivir in the sun-lit paradise of Southern Spain, which he named Vandalusia in honour of his tribe. It has taken many years, and cost many lives — this marauding migration — and we now see little Genseric, the bastard son of King Gunderic, growing up in the midst of war alarms and earning the succession to his father's throne by manifesting the courage and cunning of a born leader.
The Vandals did then as their successors have done since; they sold their services wherever they could find a purchaser; they made promises which they kept when convenient; they pressed on through the distracted provinces that now are Belgium and France, and, thanks to the fact that other German tribes were pressing at other points of the great frontier, the year 427 found
First Prussian Kaiser 7
Genseric at the port of Tarifa, not far from the rock of Gibraltar, gazing across at the mountains of Morocco and meditating a move that would fulfil the promise made to his brother Germans — a Place in the Sun!
Is it then strange that fifteen centuries later William II. should proclaim his right to an Afri- can Empire reaching from the Indian Ocean to the Atlantic — a solid central position from which he may dominate the rest of the Dark Continent as he now dreams of dominating civilised Europe from Berlin. As I write, the German General Staff is formulating plans for a strong military state in the heart of Africa — a well-drilled native army that may not merely secure the colonial possessions of the Kaiser but act as a menace on the flanks of British India and the hinterland of both Egypt and the Cape. William II., in imita- tion of his ancestor, Genseric, cares nothing for colonization in the British sense. On the con- trary, present-day Germany treats her tropical possessions as territory to be exploited for the benefit of the conqueror. The natives are re- duced to a state of vassalage; and Prussian
8 Genseric
officials administer the country on most modern and efficient principles to the end that the rail- ways and steamships of the Kaiser earn good dividends. The British colonies have been open to the commerce of the world — a policy which William II. regards as suicidal sentiment — and so did Genseric.
CHAPTER II
Progress of Vandals from Prussia to the Pillars of Hercules — Genseric professes peace to deceive his enemies.
I T seems inexplicable that a tribe of Vandals in Baltic lands between the Oder and the Elbe should in less than thirty years be at the southern- most point of Spain. The distance is over one thousand miles and their average progress was about thirty-six miles per year, or three miles for each month — a rate of speed that left abun- dant leisure for foraging and other profitable digressions. When he took any prisoners, they were either massacred or sold into slavery or incorporated as recruits, and, of course, he spared only those best fitted for his particular work. Of those who followed him from Potsdam, very few could have survived the three decades of hard- ships, and their places had to be filled. But the history of Frederick the Great, and also that of
9
io Genseric
the famous Crusaders and the Buccaneers of the Spanish Main, teaches us that a successful general readily attracts new recruits from every race and creed. Therefore it is fair to conclude that while Genseric and Frederick the Great were Vandals or Prussians, they commanded men se- lected primarily for fighting qualities and loyalty to their king.
Spain, in the days of Genseric, was nominally a part of the Roman Empire; but so many Ger- man tribes had crowded in upon that helpless peninsula that they fell to fighting one another in the interval between plundering the helpless natives. It is my private guess that Genseric from boyhood up had occupied his visionary moments with planning an attack upon the warm lands of Europe, much as William II. dreamed of sacking Bombay and Calcutta. His father's camp contained many who had served in the legions of Rome, who had spied out the weak- nesses of the enemy, and who urged a policy of outward conciliation until such time as they were ready to maintain a mastery of the seas and cut off the mother country from her great supply base
First Prussian Kaiser n
in Northern Africa. Genseric, as Crown Prince, was early initiated into this plan for world con- quest and cultivated assiduously the arts by which he could encourage the pacifism of his neighbours whilst concealing his own programme of military efficiency. He lost no occasion for proclaiming heatedly to the envoys of neighbouring states that Peace was his only aim — that he maintained an army only as a means of ensuring this worthy — not to say Christian — object !
For Genseric and his Vandals were all Christ- ians— at least in name. It would be idle here to discuss the dozens of creeds that went to make up or to dismember a Church which pretended to follow the teachings of Jesus. The German tribes had been converted by Christians who differed from those under the Bishop of Rome in a minor matter. The Romanists called them- selves Catholic and Orthodox, the Vandals called themselves Arians, but the Papists called them Heretics. When Genseric reached Tarifa he found that the whole of North Africa, from the Strait of Gibraltar to the frontiers of Egypt, a distance about the same as from Tarifa to Rugen,
12 Genseric
was inhabited also by Christians who had this in common with himself, that they were heretics in the eyes of Rome. The North-African Christ- ians were called Donatists — and once more I deserve the reader's gratitude by resisting the temptation of crowding these pages with names and dates and theological disputes — all of which must be studied by the conscientious historian, and all of which I shall keep to myself save in so far as the persecution of heresy amongst the Christians of Mauretania contributed to place the crown of Caesar on the head of a barbarian chief, whose title was that of a bastard birth amid the huts of a Baltic tribe.
No wonder that German scholars today honour Genseric as the first of the great pioneers in Welt Politik, if not Prussian Kultur. German scholars of national biography regard him as an ornament to their academic Valhalla. Military Germany honours in this great Vandal of Potsdam a soldier who would have applauded the murder of Edith Cavell or the sinking of the Lusitania — in other words who conducted war as a worthy ancestor of the Hohenzollern spirit. And above all, we
First Prussian Kaiser 13
must consider him as the father of colonization on the Prussian plan. So let us return to Tarifa and embark with Genseric for Tangiers in the year of our Lord 427.
CHAPTER III
Bonifacius helps Genseric — His credulity — Friendship of St. Augustine — Defeated in battle — Forgiven by Placidia— Genseric methods compared with those of William II — Death of St. Augustine.
VL7ILLIAU II. in 1888 ascended the Vandal throne and gave laws not merely to Germany but to more than a million square miles beyond the shores of Europe. This empire of the tropics was undreamed of at the time of his birth, and it would never have been his but for his grandmother, Queen Victoria, of blessed mem- ory, and an elderly, easy-going Lord Salisbury, who disliked anything like dispute and who yielded all that Germany asked rather than listen to long and discordant representations from Berlin. The pacifists and pro-Germans of England gave a colonial empire to Prussia and in so doing have earned the ingratitude not to say contempt of the Hohenzollerns !
14
First Prussian Kaiser 15
And it was somewhat thus fifteen centuries ago, when Genseric embarked for Morocco. In each case the Vandals occupied Africa without firing a shot — though their landing was the pre- lude to years of bloodshed. Genseric received his invitation from the Roman general commanding, Bonifacius, to assist him against his enemies; and the payment for this service was to be a portion of Morocco. Genseric had but fifty thou- sand men under his command at Tarif a, a number inadequate for offensive invasion and too small for maintaining himself even in Spain, save in the presence of disunited barbarian forces. But fortune was with him, as with many another adventurer, and he crossed the dangerous Strait of Gibraltar in safety, thanks to the assistance of Spaniards who were eager to lose him, and of Bonifacius, who hailed him as an honourable ally.
This General Bonifacius must not be confused with the many others of that well-meaning name —notably nine popes and a Devonshire mission- ary, who died in the odour of sanctity after having devoted his life to the improvement of Germany in the eighth century. Our Boniface had courage,
1 6 Genseric
military experience, noble purposes in the admin- istration of Rome's most important colony, and above all a generous human sympathy that en- deared him to his men and to even the turbulent elements that inhabited the rich country between the Atlas Mountains and the Mediterranean. He was also a warm friend of St. Augustine, Bishop of Hippo, and author of the famous Con- fessions. Indeed the Roman warrior at one time contemplated abandoning his sword for a crucifix. The loss of a dearly beloved wife affected him so profoundly that he was with difficulty dissuaded from seeking the questionable consolation of a monastery. Had he done so, however, Genseric might never have landed at Tangiers. Bonifacius took to himself a second wife, an Arian — which pained the Catholic Saint almost as much as it pleased the heretic Genseric, for Augustine, whilst encouraging Bonifacius to remain in the army, begged him to embrace a life of celibacy — and, if possible, chastity. But Bonifacius has a weak side for woman, and a respectable report credits him with more wives than one. Three women ruled the Roman Empire in these
First Prussian Kaiser 17
days, before the ballot box had banished god- desses from their feminine pedestals. One was Placidia, Regent of the West, during the minority of her son, Valentinian III. Bonifacius had been a loyal servant to her in times when this loyalty meant much ; and his appointment as commander or Viceroy in North Africa measures the esteem in which this emotional warrior was held at the Roman Court. But suddenly there came to him a summons to return immediately; and by the same courier warnings from an alleged friend that Placidia meant to disgrace him and that he should therefore disobey the order and maintain himself in Africa. We are left in doubt as to the many conflicting rumours that distracted the mind of this honest soldier. We cannot judge him, for we do not know the causes of his disastrous deci- sion. It was, maybe, one of the many cases where the Devil arrives at the moment of doubt, and when General Bonifacius doubted, Genseric appeared. He made fair promises; he sealed them with oaths; he asked but a place in the sun; his little army of fifty thousand could never do harm to that of Rome; he wanted to be a friend of Boni-
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facius; he would protect the Roman frontier against the wild Kabyle warriors of the hinter- land— in short the simple-minded General be- lieved the Prussian Genseric as he believed the tales from the Court of Placidia. In both cases he was cruelly deceived and his death, five years later, was a welcome release from a life in which he vainly sought to expiate a blunder that proved to be worse than a crime.
And so we are not surprised that Genseric, when once secure on African soil, should have immediately organized a propaganda bureau, in order to injure the cause of Rome. Like the Kaiser of today he prepared for THE DAY when he might safely drop the mask of friendship, tear up his treaties as so many scraps of paper, and march an army to the conquest of Carthage and then Rome.
William II. did not drop his mask of Peace until he had been seven years on the throne; com- pleted the North Sea-Baltic Canal; purchased the support of the Papacy in Reichstag elections, and had so drilled his people in hatred of England, that thenceforward a declaration of war would be
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not merely welcome to his army, but also to his people as the call of God to a crusade for Kultur. Genseric shared the good fortune of William II. — all his schemes worked out as though on the field of autumn manoeuvres. The wild tribes of the Atlas — a splendid race of men now as then — turned gladly to one who professed himself their friend and who slyly insinuated that he would soon lead them against their hereditary oppressors, the Roman tax-gatherers and the still more oppressive Catholic hierarchy. To the Pagans, who secretly bided by the faith of their fathers, he held out a prospect of religious liberty that would permit the temples of Jupiter and Apollo once more to be honoured. To the much persecuted Donatists he opened the vista of a glorious vengeance when the Bishops of the Papacy should be driven away and their own called back from exile. In short, between the Donatists, the Pagans of Jupiter, the hill- tribe heathen, the ubiquitous Hebrew, and the usual proportion of people who owed money, or who had escaped from justice and hoped some- thing from any change, Genseric soon dropped the mask of friendship and, three years from landing
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at Tangiers, routed the credulous Bonifacius in battle and compelled him to retire wholly from Africa and to throw himself in suppliance at the feet of Her Majesty Placidia.
And to her credit be it said that she forgave the unfortunate general upon learning of the vile manner in which his confidence had been abused by Prussian perfidy on the one side and domestic intrigue on the other. She liked the uxorious Boniface and sought to alleviate his distress by titles and posts of honour, but the loss of Africa was complete, and there remained for the author of this disaster nothing but an honourable death, which he found in a fight with the man who had sent the message by which the Prussian alone had profited.
And how he profited! We all recall his latter- day reincarnation, the Kaiser, landing at Tangiers in 1906, and loudly proclaiming to the world at large and to the Moorish rabble, in particular, that his sword was only for their protection and that in any case of trouble from French or English sources they might invoke the good offices of one more gentle and powerful even than Genseric.
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William II. made the same sort of speech in Damascus, in Constantinople — wherever he could hope to stir up rebellious movement against the established rule and profit by the ensuing broils.
Indeed in this great war, the champion of militarism and autocracy has fomented pacifism and rebellion in every country, excepting, of course, his own. In East Africa he granted large estates to the Roman Church for missionary establish- ments and at the same time marched his native troops against those of the Boer and British under banners on which were the emblems of the Mus- sulman faith side by side with the Iron Cross of Prussia. The German missionaries are to exter- minate the English language — the Crescent is to flatter the native black and make him think that the Hohenzollern also has a harem.
Genseric lost no time in traversing the length of old Mauretania — now Morocco, and the present Algeria to the edges of modern Tunis. His main purpose was to seize Carthage, but he first laid siege to Hippo-Regius which was then the second capital of North Africa; fortified physically by the arms of Boniface and spiritually by the pre-
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sence of Augustine — at least, until death released that Saint in the third month of the siege, at the comfortable age of seventy-six, anno 430. Augus- tine has recorded for the benefit of the credulous, many miracles performed in his own diocese — miracles so many that they exceed the number of years in his life. He was, moreover, a stout be- liever in the rack and stake as inducements to- wards abandoning one creed for another. He persecuted his brother Christians of the Donatist and Arian communion with the same impartial vigour that he applied to the conversion of the Jews, Pagans, and nondescript natives who harassed the southern frontiers of Northern Africa much as the bands of Northern Europe threatened the Roman frontiers of Rhine and Danube. He might have done much for the true faith had he seen fit to add one more to his list of wonders, and melted the heart of the Vandal or at least set a limit to his Vandalism. There were many precedents for some such saintly out- burst— notably the blazing Cross that led the Legions of Constantine more than a century before the siege of Hippo.
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But St. Augustine died without having helped his friend Boniface to a victory or even to an orthodox wife. The Vandal was victorious, and so was the creed of Anus. But in a very few centuries every Christian creed was swept away before the God of Mahomet who rules today in somnolent serenity from the westernmost cape of the Dark Continent through ten thousand miles of differing nations and tongues to the farther- most fringes of the Dutch East India at the very gates of the Australian continent.
And all because St. Augustine refused to perform his seventy-seventh miracle ! However, let us not criticize one whom the Pope of Rome has declared so holy that we may even pray to him as to an underling in the household of our Creator. St. Augustine wrote thousands of treatises on theo- logical matters; and, unfortunately for several popes, Genseric did not destroy this manuscript. It is curious to note that one thousand years later, many Christians were burnt at the stake for professing opinions which they had imbibed from this beatified Bishop of Hippo. You have no doubt all delighted in the Confessions of St.
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Augustine — a book like that of Jean Jacques Rousseau, which preaches the importance of be- ing virtuous after you shall have first exhausted every pleasure associated with lying, thieving, and the debauchery of women. The pastoral sage of the eighteenth century was a spiritual child of the African saint in so far as each became an object of worship after a career that would, with ordinary men, have ended at the gallows or the block.
But you may read elsewhere the lives of Boniface and Augustine — so let me hurry back to Genseric, who is besieging Hippo-Regius and with Prussian efficiency preparing his orders relating to the systematic plundering of this his first colonial prize.
CHAPTER IV
Hippo-Regius invested by Genseric — How he was helped by Pacifists and other disloyals — Sack of the city.
ENSERIC led a victorious army of Germans, Moors, and disaffected Christians from Tangiers to Hippo (the present Bona) in a little more than one year; and after the conquest of this place, it was eight years before he could enter Carthage (439) . If you will consult your map and think for yourself, you will probably feel the rough analogy between the rapid raid of the Vandal and the astounding rapidity with which William II. overran Belgium, Luxemburg, and Northern France nearly fifteen centuries later. Genseric was checked at Hippo, William II. at the Marne. Hippo is but two hundred miles from Carthage, but one thousand from Tangiers —and the rapidity of Genseric's initial raid was made possible by the same perfidious methods
25
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that enabled Prussian troops to menace the capital of France in the summer of 1914. The initial raid succeeded because Genseric had prepared the way by means of an advance army of spies, who spread the Gospel of Pacifism and Vandal Kultur, and who promised that with the destruc- tion of Rome would come an era of liberty for the oppressed Donatists and a redistribution of land in favour of all who helped in the holy war. And so it happened that Genseric flew with victorious wings one thousand miles in one or two years; he flew fast and with flattering facility so long as he had the co-operation of native forces; but at Hippo-Regius he found resistance that detained him fourteen months of wearisome siege and this time was enough to open the eyes of many paci- fists and former pro-Genserics.
There were Irish who in 1915 helped to intro- duce Prussians into their country in the fond belief that Hibernian independence could grow on a soil fertilized by the Hun. There were Irish whose religious and political fanaticism led them to destroy the fairest part of Dublin for the bene- fit of William II. But many repented as did those
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who sought to improve the Roman administration by invoking the aid of Genseric.
Hippo finally fell, and the usual Hun procedure disposed of the inhabitants. The soldiers were first let loose upon the helpless civil population as a reward for the dangers through which they had passed; and after that the more systematic pillage was undertaken with prudent Prussian efficiency. Every house was emptied of its human occupants who were camped or interned outside the city walls. All men of military age were speedily disposed of by the sword, unless they proved their desire to become recruits in the Vandal army. Young women and craftsmen were placed in a second camp and sold off into slavery or apportioned to the soldiers. The third category consisted of the old people, heads of families, those suspected of having property. Through his spies Genseric was able in the cities of Northern Africa to plunder with thoroughness surpassed only by his descendants under William II. The victims were interrogated, cross-ques- tioned, and if the answers were not satisfactory, tortured until news of concealed wealth was
28 Genseric
produced or symptoms of collapse. Before Gen- seric had completed the task of reorganizing his first important Roman conquest he had shed far more blood by the hand of the executioner than on any field of battle ; and the land which he had entered as a liberator already loathed him as a butcher.
An army of fifty thousand can do wonders on a continuous march through a country unpre- pared for war, but a line of one thousand miles needs many blockhouses or intrenched camps ; and each of these must be garrisoned and stored with food. In 1914, William II. could have landed one hundred thousand men at any point of our Atlantic coast and marched to Chicago more easily than the Vandal who raided Hippo from Tangiers in 430, for he would have been assisted by an equal proportion of Pacifists, Germans, priests of a Pro-Prussian Pope, and the disloyal elements of society who disguise disloyalty by calling themselves Socialists. Had the Roman Empire attacked Genseric with vigour whilst he lay before Hippo that would have been the end of him and his Imperial schemes. But, as I have
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already pointed out, the courts of Constantinople and Roman Ravenna were jealous one of the other; pacifism was the creed popularized by the Saints and Fathers of the so-called Christian Church, and thus Rome's most important province called in vain for help while Genseric consolidated his conquest.
Hippo is now a flourishing French port — the modern Bona — connected by fast and luxurious liners with the world at large and reaching towards Egypt, Morocco, and the Southern Empire by means of splendid roads and railways. France has been less than a century in Northern Africa, yet each year of her occupation has been marked by public works, creditable to her engineering genius and useful to the people over whom she spreads the protection of her colonial mantle. Whoever reads the description of Algiers, Oran, Tunis, Tangiers, as were these places before the arrival of France, and compares them with pre- sent conditions, must rub his eyes in wonder. Bona, which in the eighteenth century was a forlorn village, now charms the eye of the tourist and attracts the merchant or colonist by an
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administration at once enlightened and forceful. The hundred huts of a hundred years ago have given way to a city of near half a hundred thou- sand, laid out with an eye to sanitary no less than artistic effect, and the port which formerly afforded precarious anchorage to irregular adventurers, to- day shelters a fleet of steamers behind gigantic moles of masonry.
Less than a century has converted Northern Africa from a barbarous and depopulated wilder- ness into a land of security for an ever-increasing people. Less than a century sufficed for Genseric to reduce this same territory from a land rich in people and promise to one where the few sur- vivors had but one consolation in their poverty — that there was nothing more for a Vandal to plunder.
But let us now return to the Hippo of St. Augus- tine and see how Genseric finally became master of Carthage — the second city of the Empire — a city that had known no enemy since the younger Scipio — nearly six centuries.
CHAPTER V
Genseric and Frederick II. — The women whom they hated — Placidia, her husbands and her travels— Vandal offers of Peace — Carthage surprised and held as the capital of the Vandal Empire.
'"THE traveller who gazes at the Potsdam palace where William II. was born is invited by the Prussian guardian to admire the statues of three women, whom the Great Frederick exposed in a state of nudity for the edification of his subjects. These three are made to support the Prussian Crown which caps the dome of this enormous but uninteresting pile ; and it was the intention of this gallant bachelor to have the portraits exact to the last — or most indecent — detail. Needless to say, we all recognize only their faces — Ka- therine II. of Russia, Maria Theresa of Austria, and Madame de Pompadour, the plenipotentiary of Louis XV.
Genseric may also have had a Sans Souci at 31
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Carthage; and who knows if he did not anticipate Prussian history by also erecting statues to the three women whom he hated, for they ruled the Roman world of the fifth century by influences no less potent than those which excited the rage of Frederick in the eighteenth. We have already referred to Placidia the Regent of the Western Roman Empire, whose court was at Ravenna, and whose monument is even today an ornament of that beautiful city. In any gathering of great women, Placidia should find an honoured place, and few have had experience more bitter or more varied. Her father was Emperor of the East, her mother the daughter of an Emperor, her brother an Emperor, herself destined to be mother of an Emperor and to guide his Imperial hands until the day of her death. She was a woman of beauty and superior education — reared in Constantinople and at the age of twenty surprised in Rome by the barbarian army of Alaric, who, of course, carried her away as very fair spoil, after three days spent in sacking the Imperial city. But Placidia was not beautiful for nothing. She very soon ceased being a slave of Alaric, by reducing
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his brother-in-law, the quasi Crown Prince, to the r61e of suppliant for her hand. And thus she became one of the mighty forces of the world at an age when many girls are yet laboriously spelling out Homer and Cicero at Vassar or Girton. Good fortune followed close; for her German hus- band died soon after succeeding to the throne; as the widow of a King she returned to Italy, after an eventful honeymoon voyage which em- braced much of the Western Empire and afforded her many precious glimpses of court life in the barbarian world.
Husband number two was a Roman, by whom she had the future Emperor, Valentinian III. But this second husband lived but a few months, which gave her occasion for another extensive journey to her family in Constantinople. She secured here not merely forgiveness for having married a German, but was officially acclaimed as Augusta and escorted with Imperial honours back to the Roman Court at Ravenna, there to rule the Western Empire in the name of her in- fant son. And so well did she rule that her death, twenty-five years later, was mourned as
34 Genseric
a national calamity, even by her son. Although she lived only sixty years, forty of these were spent either on a throne or so near to it as to give her the virtual power of a ruler. Nor did her son ever seek to interfere with her wise regency.
When Placidia journeyed from Rome to Con- stantinople, it required almost as much time and much more physical effort than in our day does a trip to Japan or Calcutta. The roads were well- built and well-policed under the rule of Imperial Rome, and people of means travelled then as now for business, education, health, and recreation. The cities of Greece, Italy, and Thrace offered great attractions to scholars; and before the Ger- man and Scythian hordes had commenced their career of destruction, the traveller might count upon passing day after day through smiling fields and orchards, towns and villages no less pop- ulous and perhaps much more interesting than those of our time. In that of Genseric, to travel was tantamount to absorbing knowledge. To- day the man who takes the Orient Express from London to Constantinople sees less and learns
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less than did Placidia in any one stage of her leisurely journeys.
However, we must not forget our Vandal who is hammering finally at the gates of Carthage, having spent eight years in passing the two hun- dred miles from Hippo. He succeeded at last, and again duplicity was his chief weapon. From Hippo he had sent to Rome ambassadors who sued humbly for Peace on terms which restored nearly all of his conquests. Placidia, who knew that he was in dire straits, did all in her power to stir the pacifistic rulers of Constantinople, no less than of Rome, to combined warlike action. She fitted out several expeditions which harassed his line of communication to the westward, but while these added much to his military embarrassment only an armada of overwhelming strength, com- manded by a Caesar or Scipio, could undo the disaster achieved by the credulous Boniface.
Genseric signed peace treaties in order that the Roman Pacifists might have another excuse for delaying active war measures. He knew that he could break treaties when the right moment arrived; and meantime he turned his arms against
.**'•• #
:
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those who had been interfering with his dynastic aspirations. Many of his family objected to a bastard as their King — so he drowned the widow of his brother, the late King, and killed her sons and as many more of his collateral kin as he could lay hands on. The Moors are a fighting people, and we may be sure that Gen- seric needed all his wits and weapons to ward off attacks from this quarter during the critical eight years between sacking Hippo and hoisting his flag over the palace of his new Potsdam. What this flag was we know not for sure, but as the name Genseric includes the German for goose (modern, Cans) no doubt such an emblem was the prototype of the present bird that symbolizes Prussian predatory ambition on the Hohenzollern shield. Considering the short life that was ac- corded to the Vandal Empire of Genseric, the emblem of a wild goose would suggest mockery if applied by any but a German. However, the African dreams of William II. were of even less duration !
So let us follow the Wild Goose chase of Genseric which was a successful flight so long as Pacifists
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gave him their help in Rome and so long as the world believed his professions of peace and good will. His grand triumph came in 439, twelve years after landing in Africa. In a time of pro- found peace, the Vandals took the capital by surprise. Genseric explained to an outraged world that this was a strategic necessity, and the world shook its finger and some sent him notes of protest couched in elegant language. But the Vandals raped and pillaged as though 439 were 1914, and Carthage another name for Belgium.
CHAPTER VI
Pulcheria, Empress of the East — Her court of priests and eunuchs —Pacifism and Papacy — Genseric at Carthage plans the pillage of Rome — Sea supremacy then and now.
HPHE second lady whom Genseric selected to adorn the cupola of his new palace at Car- thage was Pulcheria, virtual Empress of Con- stantinople for the best part of forty years. She had barely reached the years of puberty when the highest earthly rank was accorded her, that of Augusta; but to a saintly soul no earthly honour was comparable to that which became hers by depositing her virginity as a sacrifice on the al- tar of orthodox piety. Her palace of Constanti- nople became a convent of nuns where no men entered save only such as are abhorrent in the eyes of healthy women. Genseric rubbed his hands with joy when he learned by his spies that
pacifism was popular on the Bosphorus, and that
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his best friends were the Priests of the Papacy, who opposed all war save that waged upon brother Christians whom they called heretics.
Pulcheria was officially declared to have merited the honour of sanctification at the hands of the Pope, not merely because she declined to assist in the propagation of her species, but mainly on account of her pious zeal in the roasting of un- orthodox Christians. And so we have here the lesson of a long reign by a virgin, whose court was a model of propriety ; whose counsellors were priests and eunuchs; and whose people held peace conferences whilst the Prussian was pre- paring to sack the world's metropolis !
Some will possibly revert to the reign of Vic- toria whilst reading that of Pulcheria — and some may smile at a parallel fifteen centuries apart. But when Prussia in 1864 broke into helpless Denmark, robbed her of people and territory, as Genseric did in North Africa, it was the duty of Victoria to forbid this outrage as it was that of Pulcheria to aid Placidia in protecting Carthage. But Victoria was under pacifistic, not to say Prussian, influence, and her complaisance towards
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Bismarck in the rape of Denmark led to the War of 1866 and then that of 1870 — and all the while pious people sang her praises in a hymn whose refrain was ever, "She kept us out of war!"
Two years after the death of Pulcheria, the Vandals were in Rome, and Victoria died during a war which was lengthened if not created by German influence. Victoria and Pulcheria were good women in the church and drawing-room sense; they stood for social purity and domestic dignity; but as guiding forces of great empires in a time of external menace they were useful mainly to the enemy. William II. has profited by the pacifistic policy of his sainted grandmother. Genseric looked upon the eunuchs of Constanti- nople as his most precious allies.
And so in this 439th year of our saintly era the King of the Vandals made himself at home in Carthage, first by enslaving all of the population that was fit for labour, and secondly by confiscat- ing all the real or personal property of this very wealthy metropolis. It had taken the Vandals nearly a full generation to shift their habitat by a series of semi-pacific penetrations from the
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Baltic to the Straits of Gibraltar. Each stage of their journey had brought them in contact with people on a higher plane of social and political ideas than those on the Havel. In Carthage, after ten years amid the unwonted luxury of semi- tropical civilisation, they finally found themselves at the goal of their military ambition; masters of a capital replete with the accumulated treasures of many centuries; a city of palaces and noble monuments; of academies, where the literary grandeur of Euripides was exposed by men speak- ing the tongue of Cicero. The Carthage of Rome became the military headquarters of a Prussian commander in chief; the light of learning waned as the Vandal power waxed, and in less than a hun- dred years the province that had been the garden of the western world sank to the level of a Prussian colony — an African Elsass-Lorraine.
Take up your atlas now, and think for yourselves without consulting books. Note the position of Carthage (or Tunis) half-way between the ends of that long northern strip of Africa. Note that with a fair westerly breeze you would require but a few hours to reach Sicily, or with a westerly
42 Genseric
one arrive at Sardinia. Ancient Rome reasoned justly that her empire was not safe whilst a hostile navy was collected at Carthage. It was imperative that Rome conquer Carthage as in- cidental to conquering supremacy on the trade routes of the then known world. So long as Rome was true to her own history, the Mediterranean remained a Roman lake, but when the Roman navy was neglected, Genseric seized the oppor- tunity and determined to challenge the mistress of the seas on her hereditary element.
William II. was profoundly impressed by a book on sea supremacy by an American naval officer. There was nothing in the book that was not a commonplace to Genseric, but it gave to the Prussians of today their first idea of what they might achieve if only the sea power of England could in some manner be impaired. Genseric may have read some similar work as Mahan's Influence of Sea Power, for Carthage had excel- lent libraries; and maybe like William II. he had it translated into German and studied by the cadets of his war classes. But this may have been superfluous in the Prussian Carthage, be-
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cause the Vandals, according to the fashion of their kind, were anxious to copy the ways of a higher civilisation; and while no Roman would ever learn Gothic, every German would be flat- tered if his African concubine told him that he spoke Latin with a Parisian — or Roman — accent! And then the matter was made easy to Genseric by the zeal of Christian missionaries or spies who laid before him a detailed picture of the discord in Church and State; how the people were dis- tracted by theological civil war; how the slaves and Jews would help along any cause likely to help the enemy from outside ; how the court and army were honeycombed with intrigue and Placi- dia — a woman ! The wonder was, not that Gen- seric plotted the sack of Rome, but that he delayed so long an act that seemed prepared in advance by the pacifistic policy of a priest-ridden empire.
CHAPTER VII
Career of Alaric — Pillage of Greece and Rome — Aided by Christians — End of Alaric.
'"PHERE are still many people who profess indifference to past history, because they have been early inoculated in the restful heresy that the human race has evolved from apes or oysters and that therefore the Prussian of 1918 is a more respectable man than Alaric, Attila, or Genseric. The theory of so-called human evolu- tion is an amusing guess that bears to science the same relation that a William Jennings Bryan does to an Alexander Hamilton or a Benjamin Franklin. Genseric and Alaric and Attila were the contemporaneous manifestation of God's law in human affairs. They united in hastening the downfall of the Roman Empire by methods an- alogous to those in vogue today by the Prussia of William II. The Barbarians of fourteen cen-
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turies ago were Christian and cruel — but not more Christian or more cruel than those who today expose women and children to slow death in an open boat on the high seas or who have revived the use of poisonous gas in war between man and man. The Barbarians of old were Christian and cruel, but let us not compare them unfavourably with Prussians of today whose Kaiser is a Lutheran and whose principal allies are a polygamous Sultan and a celibate Pope.
Genseric, Attila, and Alaric form a German trinity, dear to the Prussian of today — sacred in their Walhalla of heroes — emblem of national power in the past, promise of world empire in the future.
Alaric was born at the mouth of the Danube although his tribe was from the Baltic. His family pride consisted in being of the Balti— a name reminiscent of the great northern sea and thence applied to the marshy district at the Bulgarian mouth of the Danube. Some Ger- man scholars have suggested that Alaric 's Baltic root meant " audacious." But etymology is dan- gerous— perhaps more dangerous even than theo-
46 Genseric
logy. We are left to surmise how Alaric rose from a Bulgarian Baltic to be first King of the Visigoths; but I am inclined to think from per* sonal impression of that Lower Danubian swamp, that the tribe of Balti owed its persistence and power to the same fortunate circumstances that preserved the Batavi at the mouths of the Rhine; the Veneti in the lagoons of the Adriatic and the Vandals on the upper waters of the Spree and Havel. Germans today use the word belt for parts of the Baltic — bell being a Keltic word for sea, as balteus is Latin for a girdle. The Lithu- anians possibly name the Baltic the white sea, from its short choppy waves — baltas in their tongue meaning white. Then again I have known a Russian town named Bait a, between Kieff and the Danube and there is another Balta on the European side of the Bosphorus, to say nothing of a Baltistan in British India.
So let us leave the pleasing yet perplexing fields of philology and limit ourselves to knowing this great German hero through the eyes of adoring historians of his own race.
We must again remind you that the outskirts
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of the Roman Empire were guarded in a precarious manner by armies of barbarian Germans, half- soldiers and half-colonists, roughly analogous to the Cossack tribes on the fringes of Russia or some semi-independent states of British India in our time. And again you must not expect exactness, for you may find Huns, Vandals, Goths, Alani, Suevi, Alemanni mixed up together under any barbarian leader who happened to be so popular and powerful as to promise a successful campaign of plunder. Such a leader was Alaric, and it was with such men that the old Roman Empire made bargains with a view to protecting itself against those more dangerous still. Don't be too harsh in your contempt for the expiring empire — she was more than one thousand years old and her life had not been one of past inaction. She was like a house full of lazy servants, and we are considering her at a time when there is riot in the servants' hall and the mistress is ill in bed. Alaric passed under specious pretexts from the Danube swamps to the Vale of Tempe and the groves of Academe. In his path lay the glories of ancient Greece and in his wake the flames of
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desolate villages. When he closed his visit to the city of Pericles and Plato, it is said to have recalled the bleeding and empty skin of a slaugh- tered victim. Alexander was also a conqueror, — so was Caesar — so was Napoleon. But Napo- leon in Weimar talked of poesy with Goethe. Alexander gloried in being a pupil of Aristotle; and Caesar studied the science of government with the wise men of an age rich in men of public experience and intellectual grandeur. These three were conquerors, but in their train went scholars, poets, archaeologists, and men of science. The train of Alaric was like that of the Prussian in Belgium — a train of spies with lists of the people who had something worth plundering — an in- ventory of the pagan temples and their treasures of art. Alaric found the Pope's alliance valuable — or at least the daily assistance given to his generals by the Christian priests, who thought it an act of piety to obliterate every vestige of pagan art. Alaric's raid through Hellas was about fifteen centuries before the Hohenzollern led his Huns into Belgium — and now we think better of Alaric, if not of his priests.
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We next note the King of the Visigoths in Rome, gratifying his motley army with a three days' debauch at the expense of this treasury of metro- politan magnificence. There is little but repeti- tion in recording the sack of cities — girls are seized and carried away from their homes for purposes into which it is idle to make enquiry; men are butchered if they happen to be in the way of the conquerors; the spies are busy de- nouncing those who have property and the Roman slaves have ample opportunity for re- venge against former oppressors. Slaves and Jews make common cause with Christian priests in denouncing the pagan aristocracy; in sacking the pagan places of worship; in cementing the brotherhood of the oppressed; in planting the banner of a generous and gentle saviour amidst the bleeding carcasses of those for whom He died.
The work of ferreting out and torturing the reluctant rich would have been difficult had Alaric not enjoyed the zealous assistance of these allies. His military waggons were soon loaded and thus, thanks to Christian co-operation, he was enabled
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to march on to his ultimate goal — the conquest of Africa.
He was about the same age as Genseric — and the two might have met for the first time on an Afri- can battlefield and there fought for the crown of a world empire. But death put a stop to his depredations, just when he was preparing to cross over into Sicily and thence to Carthage.
A little stream of Calabria is called the Busento, and here the chief was buried in fashion suited to Prussian taste for crude and grandiose effect. Thousands of Roman slaves were set to work, digging a new channel for the stream and then, in the dry bed of the old Busento, their youthful King was buried with all the honours that his mourning followers could devise. After this the new course was closed and the waters were once more permitted to pursue their natural course, over the royal coffin. The river gods mourned at this defilement — and still more so when the thousands who had slaved at this profane task were butchered at the river's bank in order that the secret might remain a German one. The stream ran red with innocent Roman blood; yet
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German histories revel in such cruelty, so long as the perpetrator is a German and the victim one of a higher race.
But nature herself was shocked and the scene of this bloody funeral has since been visited by earthquakes that have convulsed Calabria, torn the earth as with the plough of an avenging God, and shaken the coffin of Alaric from the bed of the Busento, to be spewed out forever from the soil of a free Italy — the land that had known her Cicero and her Caesar; that was to know her Dante and Savonarola, and that seems today reserved for a triumph even more precious to humanity — the triumph of civil liberty over priestcraft.
CHAPTER VIII
Attila and Martin Luther at Eisenach — Invasion of Gaul by the Huns — Saints and soldiers — Final defeat of the Germans at Chalons.
A TTILA is the third of our male trinity. His origin is obscure, but he ruled over an army composed of Germans, with a liberal admixture of lower Danuban elements, mainly Magyar and Mongolian. He and Genseric were born perhaps in the same year; possibly under the same malevo- lent horoscope; they were Prussian in purpose; they were terrible in their powers of destruction; their empires were short-lived, but their examples are a consolation and stimulus to the modern carriers of Kultur. Attila held for some time an Imperial Court at Eisenach, where Tannhauser sang the joys of amorous bestiality and where Martin Luther translated the Holy Bible. On
the occasion of my visit the warden of the castle
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showed me a large splosh of ink in the cell of the great reformer. I looked at it carefully — it had the features of Attila, or was it that the King of the Huns was uppermost in my thoughts as I neared the stain of blackness! "It was here," said the warden, "that the Devil appeared to our holy man, who seized his inkstand, threw it violently, and — the Devil disappeared." But Attila had the best of it, for while Martin Luther is excluded from the Catholic Walhalla of German heroes, Attila is a name enshrined in the heart of every patriotic German, be he Protestant or Papist, of Berlin or Bavaria. The high priests of German heroes, the makers of national opera and patriotic pictures, draw their inspiration from the King of the Huns, and his contemporaries in crime. The very name is given by mothers to their innocent babes at the font of Christian bap- tism, and Attila fills the heart of the modern Prussian with dreams of glory and prospective plunder. When William II. sent his troops to Pekin, to a people who embody the gentle pre- cepts of the Buddha to their most pacifistic con- clusion, he used this language:
Al
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"And as one thousand years ago the Huns under Attila achieved a fame that still lives and fills the world with terror, so let Germany in China appear in such frightfulness that no Chinaman will ever again dare to look a German in the face ! "
The Germans who marched about China by order of William II. needed little urging in order to emulate the example of their terrible Etzel. They plundered and they destroyed in the land of Confucius with an efficiency worthy of their great heroes, whether Hun or Hohenzollern. The wells became choked with the corpses of Chinese girls who preferred death to the clasp of a Christian Prussian. The American general protested in vain, when the commander of Wil- liam II. carried away as booty to Potsdam even the famous astronomical instruments that had been for several centuries an ornament of the Chinese capital through the bounty of a French King.
All this I write down in order that you may no longer do injustice to the memory of Attila. You and I have been reared to regard him as the Scourge of God, the enemy of mankind, and the
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name that enables us to characterize all that awakens loathing under the one word HUN! Indeed, even in the Germany of my youth, the Huns were akin to Red Indians in the popular mind; and when I enquired about towns and castles of the Danube during a canoe trip that carried me from its headwaters to the Black Sea, there seemed to me scarce a settlement that had not a tale of horror dating from the days of Attila. But this horror has been slowly, systemati- cally dissipated by patriotic professors. Richard Wagner and the Nibelungen poets have at last so hypnotized the minds of the modern youth, that their Etzel of Etzelsburg now receives the incense of every orthodox priest of Prussian Kul- tur, because in general, his ferocity was directed against a civilisation not "made in Germany!"
Genseric honoured in Alaric the German who showed him the way to the plunder of Rome and the conquest of Africa; but in Attila he found a twin spirit who fought for him in the same strate- gic field of war — who occupied the forces of Rome in one part of the world while the Vandals perfected their operations in another. Genseric
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knew that his hold on Carthage was precarious unless he could secure the aid of his fellow Ger- mans and thus prevent the Imperial forces from uniting against him.
Attila came to the throne whilst Genseric was meeting his difficulties in Hippo and preparing the surprise of Carthage. Both men were of military vision, and Attila could not fail to appreciate his immense advantage — the opportunity of raiding into the heart of the Roman Empire while his Vandal ally completed the task of cutting off Rome from her vast granary in Northern Africa. Attila chose the line of the Danube and the Rhine; broke into what is now France, destroyed the beautiful buildings of Rheims; in short be- haved there much as his descendants are now doing in this fair garden of Europe — dotted then as now with villas, works of art, monuments to municipal prosperity — in short, the infinite signs of a wealthy and well-ordered civilisation. The Hun had razed Metz to the ground, and we have trust- worthy record that such of them as now take an interest in German affairs from other spheres have no reason to think that the butchery, pillage,
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and arson, which he practised then on his march into France, have been allowed to languish in the modern campaigns of the Hohenzollern. France blossomed into saintly fables by way of disguis- ing her lack of soldiers — indeed so many were the Christian pacifists by this time that it was easier to find a saint than a soldier. Every town that Attila contemptuously ignored as not worth delay, at once attributed its deliverance to some celes- tial interposition in the person of an angel, priest, or other substitute for universal military service. The Parisians to this day burn candles to St. Genevieve, because they think she led Attila astray, or at least caused him to avoid their city. But the cities which were sacked and burned and abandoned by the Hun — well — it's usual to con- demn them as having deserved some such punish- ment because they had been guilty of harbouring heretics or pagans or if there were none such on hand, then maybe their calamities came because they had not offered candles enough to their orthodox saint or money enough to their orthodox priests ! Whichever way Attila turned, the Church turned also, and always to its own advantage.
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France was much more saintly fifteen centuries ago, when the German hordes devastated her fields as far as Orleans. Are we to conclude that the glorious victory of the Marne, in 1914, came as a reward to a nation that chose rather to rely on soldiers than saints in a battle for free- dom and that preferred to see her priests at the front fighting the enemy with a hand grenade than in a pulpit at the rear, fulminating gases that had no terror for the Hun?
At Orleans Attila was checked by the necessi- ties of a wearisome siege and the news that a combination of Roman armies was marching in such force as to threaten his retreat to the Rhine. His grand move had failed; the brother Barba- rians on whom Attila had counted to aid hirn against their master and employer of Rome saw their interest in driving away so dangerous a rival; and thus it came about that he was brought to bay in the fields near Chalons-sur-Marne, and compelled to fight one of the great decisive battles of the world — a battle of such ferocity that the very dead are in tradition seen battling overhead whilst the streams run red with the blood of every
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tribe between the plains of Scythia and the mount- ains of Thuringia. How many were killed in that fight of civilisation against barbarism we cannot tell. Darkness ended the bloody work; the Hun retired, never again to reappear on French soil — at least in the lifetime of Attila; and history must choose between chronicles that tell of the corpses numbering anywhere between one hun- dred thousand and three hundred thousand.
CHAPTER IX
Attila retires and reappears at Aquileia — Huns and German Kultur— -Death and funeral of Attila.
\A7HEN William II: made his great raid into the somnolent Europe of 1914, he made an ardent address to his men. Indeed he made many, and the more he failed in the field, the more ardent became his oratory. It was on Au- gust igth of 1914 that he issued this august com- mand: "It is now your task, first to exterminate the scoundrelly English and brush aside the con- temptible little army of General French."
Three summers have revolved since this Hun- like boast insulted the summer skies of Belgium. The little army of England has seized with joy that clumsy word contemptible, and each year the veterans of that famous fight come together as brothers in arms and survivors of the first heroic
shock, and known affectionately as the "contemp-
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tibles." It was a small army that checked the enemy at Thermopylae; Wellington faced Napo- leon at Waterloo with a force that promised little, and the hordes of Germany grinned at the prospect of easy butchery when they saw how few were the British, who stood between them and the sack of London in that hot, desperate summer, just 1463 years since the pillage of France by Attila. The soldiers of William II. have spoiled and raped; but rapine and spoils alone add little to the lustre of a conqueror — save in the pages of a Hun historian.
Attila recrossed the Rhine after the slaughter of Chalons, but evidently his German followers and particularly his German waggons, piled high with plunder, spread the report of alleged victories and concealed the number of his dead. The Prussian is the most docile of soldiers under the lash, but the most turbulent of mobs in the forum, and we may assume that Attila knew his Prussians and acted accordingly. On the retreat from Chalons he massacred his hostages and tore to pieces two hundred young women by lashing their limbs to the whifHetrees and then lashing
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the horses. The bleeding remains were hung by the roadside as a warning to his pursuers and a lesson in Schrecklichkeit to the military mentors that were to carry on his war methods — even unto the day of Kaiser Kultur. If there is an abomina- tion that the Huns did not commit in the France of 452, it must be that Attila failed to think of it in time. I have read widely in the history of Tamerlane, Ghengis Khan, the Holy Inquisition, and warfare amongst Red Indians, but the story of our kind must be scraped with a fine-tooth comb in order to find another example of cruelty so cold- blooded, so persistent, and so ineffectual from a white man's point of view.
But let us hurry on to poor Genseric who is building a great German colony in Africa and will be sacking Rome without our assistance unless we dispose of Attila in this chapter.
Then behold the Hun once more safe beyond the borders of France and on his throne, amidst crouching courtiers from every tribe, between the Elbe and the Alps. Europe had pushed him back, but had not destroyed his power for mischief. He was afforded time to gather a new army and
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start once more to plunder the fat cities of the Empire — this time approaching Rome by way of the Eastern Alps.
His march was through the rich country, ad- joining modern Trieste; and as he was checked at Orleans on his raid through France, so here the siege of Aquileia gave time for Europe to get her troops together — albeit very slowly and re- luctantly. Aquileia was in those days an im- portant seaport at the mouth of the Isonzo, a centre of commercial highways, monuments of art and schools of learning. Attila laid siege to a city of half a million inhabitants; and when that city fell the death-rate rose and the walls crumbled and in a few weeks the Hun historian could proudly state that the horse of Attila could canter across the plain where Aquileia once was and — never stumble. There were dozens of Aqui- leias in the path of Attila, but they are forgot- ten because of their mere number. There were thousands put to the sword for the crime of hav- ing defended their fireside; there were thousands roasted and mutilated for the sake of treasure imaginary or real, and the Hun waggon trains
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creaked away towards Rome filled with treasures that a barbarian could steal, but not appreciate; and beside the creaking carts were lashed thou- sands of young girls whom savages could defile but never conciliate.
To pursue the theme further were to watch every ox or hog that sheds its blood in a Kansas City packing house. One glimpse must be enough. Nor would I give you even this one glimpse, but for the great war inaugurated by the modern Hun. We old people had gradually come to think that there could be no more Attilas or Alarics or Gen- series. We opened our political and academic frontiers to Germans and welcomed them as kindly creatures who wished to help us not merely in developing our commerce, but in giving our universities the blessings of Prussian Kultur. We no more dreaded their disloyalty than did the Europe of fifteen centuries ago — we became pacifists here as they also did in Rome and Con- stantinople. And now I am compelled to drag Attila forth from his forgotten grave just as I might feel compelled to exhibit the body of a drunkard in order to warn a young man against
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over-indulgence. Attila was of little importance in his time. He made some furious raids; he killed many people; he put still more to the tor- ture; he destroyed many precious works of art; burned many libraries, and depopulated many villages and towns. But what of that! Earth- quakes, tornadoes, and tidal waves have done as much. We lament these manifestations of nature, profit by the experience, and set to work repairing the damage to the extent of our power.
We might thus think of Attila and his boast that, where the horse of a Hun had once rested his hoof the grass never grew again. We might shudder at such moral perversion as we do on learning that the law has rid the world of some peculiarly insane criminal. Indeed hi my boy- hood, the civilised world was ready to relegate the King of the Hun to the limbo of legendary monsters out of which only a Richard Wagner could concoct a hero.
But, no, Prussian Kultur would not let Attila rest, nor yet his brother barbarians. We thought the Prussians joked, but the war of 1914 came, and with it a new Attila, with a bigger and newer
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army; with tribes equally varied and even more hungry for blood and booty, and now as then we must destroy the monster or be destroyed by him.
Attila was again pushed back out of Italy, after sacking many cities and negotiating a peace treaty that left him all his booty, a handsome indemnity, and his forces unimpaired. So he made a triumphant retreat to his capital. This time it was not Eisenach, but somewhere near the modern Buda-Pest, a city renowned for the beauty and vigour of its women. Here he celebrated his alleged victories. Poets sang of the cities he had sacked; his train of captives testified to the success of his arms and the miles of waggons rejoiced those whose eyes were unaccustomed to the treasures of European palaces. Here he received servile embassies from farthest lands, even so far as Persia and Afghanistan, and here he planned his next conquest — the world.
And who dares call him presumptuous, save in so far as we may doom any conqueror to failure who has not learned to conquer his own lower appetites.
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Attila was conquered by a woman, not merely pushed gently back as were his armies out of France and Italy, but wholly routed and extin- guished. Like Ludwig I. of Bavaria, Attila was famed for the quantity of his concubines rather than for their quality, and whilst celebrating his victories over the sons of Mars he collapsed ignominiously on the couch of Venus. His empire collapsed with him, his armies dispersed, his heirs scrambled in dispute over lands, which had been held together only by the terror of his name; and all by the magic of a little Magyar maiden — and may God bless her posterity!
Of course Attila was buried with military honour and as military honour is nothing if not bloody in the land that glorifies the Hun, his grave was dug by captives and these were slaughtered immediately afterwards for the same sentimental reasons that caused the butchery of those who had assisted Alaric to his final resting place. No one today knows the grave of this devastator; we only guess at the city of Hungary where he planned his prospective campaign; we hate him, as we hate cruelty, perfidy, barbarism, but we
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must, in war, learn from our enemy, and since Attila lives in the heart of his Hohenzollern successors, it is our duty to know his ways and — be warned.
CHAPTER X
Genseric in modern Germany — Colonization then and now — Building of Vandal navy — Sea raids — And why the Roman Empire did so little.
FREDERICK THE GREAT of Prussia is cred- P
ited with a maxim, which no doubt came
down directly from Genseric: "My first business is to grab. I can always find enough professors to justify me afterwards." Genseric no doubt dis- pensed many decorations and preferments to the Pundits of Mauretania, who published poems or pamphlets in his honour; he had his spies in the university lecture-rooms no less than in the churches, and whilst he loudly proclaimed Liberty of Conscience, he silently suppressed those priests or professors who treated him otherwise than as a beneficent emanation from the Sun-God of Kultur. Nothing has changed in this respect ; the professors of modern Prussia swing incense before the altars
of their Hohenzollern high priest with a vigour no
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less than that which inspired the academic slaves of Carthage and Hippo. It might some day be in- teresting to study the spirit of modern Prussia, as a reincarnation of those whom we know histori- cally as Goths, Vandals, and Huns, and whom we applaud at considerable expense when they bellow at us from the opera, dressed up as heroes, and labelled Siegfried, Gunter, and Dietrich von Bern. Genseric therefore pacified his Prussian pro- vinces of Africa undisturbed by the dread of public opinion or any embarrassing questions in parlia- ment. Wherever natives complained, he made a punitive raid; killed all fighting men; carried away those whom he could use as slaves; burned the villages, after having plundered them; and as a warning to the neighbours, mutilated the very fruit trees. This last act of Genseric has been reprobated by some historians, amongst them a few Germans. But they wrote before William II. invaded Belgium and renewed in Europe the practices that made the name of German hateful even to the Moors. Death is disagreeable only in anticipation. Those whom Genseric killed ceased to suffer; but who can paint the misery
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of mothers, children, and venerable dependents, returning to find their little home ablaze, their cattle driven away, their men butchered, and their young women deported! How begin to even live! How can they plant, plough, or build anew their house and barn? But the final blow falls when they see the trees that have taken years to grow laid waste ! Their olive trees even ! But Prussian historians dwell sparingly on the petty tragedy of a peasant's cabin, and modern Germany knows little of the Kaiser's colonial war in South-west Africa, where the Hereros suffered under the rule of William II. much of what Northern Africa felt under the Vandal colonization. Genseric occupied sixteen years in preparations to sack Rome, and these years were spent in sending assurances to many courts that he was a peace-loving monarch and if he ever rattled his sabre it was to repel some attack upon his beloved fatherland! He devoted all the energy of his nature to construct a navy — not merely one capable of making raids upon the rebellious towns to the west of him, but one so great as to ensure for him the mastery of the
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Mediterranean. The Algerine pirates have ever been a byword for enterprising seamanship and swift sailing galleys. Their craft was highly developed many centuries before that of Genseric and when the Vandal Empire vanished, the Moorish keels remained, and even today warn us how much we owe to the big ocean policeman called John Bull!
Genseric was a pious prince, after the Prussian pattern, and when he found leisure for a piratical raid he led the way aboard his flagship and prayed his Herr Gott to steer him towards any land de- serving of divine punishment. And the German historian notes with patriotic unction that as the Vandal King never failed to find just the sort of plunder sought for in his prayers, so the even more pious William II. reached his promised land for equally satisfactory reasons. The fleets of Genseric descended at short intervals on every island or coast within easy range of Carthage. They gave no warning, their movements were swift, the time was well chosen, and from each raid they returned heavily freighted with money, jewels, costly fabrics, and more slaves.
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And, of course, you ask why the great and powerful Empire of Rome permitted these out- rages. And, by way of answer, I ask you to consider that in my youth Germany owned not a single square mile of colonial territory and pro- fessed complete indifference to such cumbersome ornaments. But her rape of Denmark in 1864, her absorption of several more states in 1866, and finally the foul Prussianizing of Elsass-Lorraine after the War of 1870, turned the taste of her predatory princes towards possessions beyond the narrow seas.
Answer me, therefore, how it happened that the good-natured Europe of the Victorian Era woke up one morning to find that Germany was master of a colonial empire embracing more than a million square miles ; and on the German throne was a Kaiser who prayed and preached the gospel of universal Peace. You must also answer me why it was that Europe permitted the modern Genseric to persistently increase his land and sea forces, although he was threatened by none of his neighbours. You must also explain how it happened that for two decades before the raid
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into Belgium, Prussia was piling up stores of war material and secretly perfecting new and inhuman engines of destruction. Also you will have to reconcile this with an elaborate pro- German propaganda no less than the cordial co-operation of the Pope of Rome, the Catholics in the Berlin Reichstag, to say nothing of the Irish priests in America and the Romish Canadians of Quebec and Montreal.
Genseric was a pious man, after the Potsdam pattern; and between his plundering raids he cheerfully subscribed to treaties of amity and promises of future fidelity. The courts of the great Roman state did occasionally send forth an expedition to punish him, but these failed because Genseric was crafty, well-informed, swift in action, terrible in his vengeance, and above all fought as a professional against amateurs. We have in these days seen the world ablaze since July of 1914; we have been part of an empire whose population is officially rated at more than one hundred million; we have been for three years menaced by German submarines and our fron- tiers have been raided by forces set in motion
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from Berlin. For three long years we have ex- hibited our military nudity to the laughter of a modern Genseric, and as I write our few troops are shivering for want of suitable clothing, whilst the death roll deals mainly in diseases traceable to political neglect if not to pro-German pacifism. When you shall have given to yourself a satisfac- tory answer in regard to the Genseric of 1914, I shall perhaps be able to blame the Europe of 455 for permitting the Vandal intruder, not merely on the African coast but in the very capital of the Empire.
And this brings us to the year when Genseric pillaged Rome!
CHAPTER XI
Sack of Rome by Genseric — Eudoxia seized and deported — One of her daughters married to the Crown Prince.
IN the early summer of 455, Genseric anchored at the mouth of the Tiber. With him an- chored a strong fleet manned by the best of his Vandal and Moorish warriors, also many roomy transports for a return cargo of booty. He had long been preparing for this culminating stroke and chose the hour when the holy city was torn by civil disorder and a palace revolution. The beautiful Empress Eudoxia had been left a widow through the murder of her husband and had been then compelled to marry his successor, whom she rightfully suspected of having connived at the bloody work. But he in turn was murdered within three months; and the hour of his death was that in which the advance of Genseric marched
from Ostia to the Vatican. The man of genius
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is he who eliminates the most accidents, and the coincidence of Genseric's appearance at the mo- ment of Eudoxia's vengeance should, we think, be credited less to accident than to the planning of a remarkably crafty and enterprising general. The murderer of her husband shared the bed but not the secrets of Eudoxia; and whilst she smiled beside him on the throne, her emis- saries were negotiating for the aid of Genseric to rid her of this unhallowed consort. Love and hatred are equally maddening, and we may forgive Eudoxia for blindly clutching at any help that promised release from the one she hated.
And who knows if this Prussian prototype did not for once feel impelled towards the beautiful Eudoxia with sentiments in which plunder played but a secondary role. Car- thage was separate from Rome by only a few days of fair wind and lusty rowing. Eudoxia was free — the Roman throne was vacant — Con- stantinople was far away — the Catholic Church was a body of pacifists, and all that Genseric needed to make him respectable was such an
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alliance as would enable him to speak as a cousin of the Roman Caesars.
Bear in mind that the Vandal King was now between fifty and sixty years of age. This is not much for one whose life is regular and sheltered; but in the case of a conqueror whose whole life had been one of gypsy wandering and whose frame had been shaken by many fevers, we must consider him as an old man concerned more with the future of his children than the success of his next plundering expeditions. His African empire was unstable as are all conquests made merely by the sword. He was perpetually harassed by domestic wars and still more disturbed by the prospect of a conflict in which the whole might of the two Roman empires would fall upon him and drive him into the sea or the desert. He had schemed for a German Colonial Empire, but so far his success had been no more encourag- ing than that of his descendants fourteen centu- ries later. He had exhausted the resources of trickery and cruelty, of fraud and frightf ulness. Are we not reminded of William II. at Damascus in that moving year of 1898, when, after failing
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to bully Admiral Dewey at Manila, he sought to stir up the spirit of Mahometans against the British in India. Listen to an evangelical Kaiser proclaiming his love for the line of Bagdad — the railway line, be it understood : ' ' May His Majesty the Sultan as well as the three hundred million of Mussulmans who venerate him as their Khalifa be assured that the German Emperor is their friend forever!" Genseric could not have spoken more smoothly to Eudoxia — but it was all in vain! Not only did the above mentioned three hundred millions decline to follow the Kaiser when he marched upon Belgium; they even revolted against His Majesty the Sultan; they remained loyal to England, whose flag floats today (1918) both at Bagdad and Jerusalem.
But returning to the beautiful Eudoxia, Gen- seric entered the capital of the ancient world without a blow — even as a guest. The heads of the Catholic community met him in state and in return for this and other services, the Vandals promised to spare all Christian sanctuaries. To be sure, Genseric had but fourteen days of pillage; but with a willing army and a large auxiliary
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force of Christian slaves and well-informed priests the city of the Caesars was able to amply repay this campaign of pacifistic penetration. Alaric had been there forty -five years before, but only for a short week; and besides Alaric was young— a mere beginner compared with Genseric. Alaric moreover had only a waggon train where the Vandal had cargo space capable of transporting an almost unlimited quantity. Alaric in 410 was hastening to conquer an African province ; Genseric already had one and needed now only some more furniture for his home.
The work of pillage and torture was therefore done more conscientiously in 455. Lists had been prepared beforehand; and after the soldiers had wearied themselves with the usual rape and slaughter, Genseric set to work systematically to strip the city of everything that was or could be converted into coin. Pagan temples and Catholic churches yielded their stores of gold and silver ornament, and a third religion was laid under contribution when Genseric seized the temple spoils of Jerusalem which had been brought in triumph by Titus nearly four centuries before.
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Amongst these was the golden candlestick with the seven branches and many other holy objects made under directions of the God who spake out of the clouds on Mount Sinai. Where oh where ! were the innumerable saints whose miracles form a weary catalogue of hagiological humbug? Why did they not prevent the sack of orthodox treas- ures? Why did they allow the holy altarpieces of Moses to become the spoil of a heretic? Why did they not sink the ships bearing such sacred furniture? And what must the scoffer think when we learn that the only holy spoils lost to the Vandal by shipwreck were such as came from temples dedicated to the Gods of Olympus.
Rome had in those days perhaps two million souls; and two weeks was a niggardly time allow- ance for one who wished to pillage with efficiency. But Genseric did his best — even to wrenching the brass and lead from the roofs of public build- ings. No written bulletins have been preserved; but, knowing the Prussian as we do, it is not reasonable to charge him with abandoning a fat prize like Rome until he had searched out every
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ounce of plumbing and every square foot of cur- tain or carpet. We must conclude, therefore, in fairness to Genseric, that he was frightened away by the danger of being cut off from his ships or possibly news from his African hinterland. He gathered together thousands of young girls, selected for their capacity to work or amuse; he took as many males as he needed to man his extra galleys and finally he selected as ornaments of his headquarters staff, not only the beautiful Eudoxia, but her two Imperial daughters.
One of these daughters he married off to his crown prince Hunrich, and the name suggests a compliment intended for the nation of the late lamented King Attila. Eudoxia herself, although only in her thirty-third year, and therefore just blooming into the ripe age of worship-inspiring womanhood, succeeded not merely in concealing her hatred for the tyrant, but in protecting herself from his degrading proposals. Seven years she was kept as a hostage in Africa, but finally (462), through costly negotiations and the fear of evil consequences, Eudoxia was returned with Im-
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penal honours to her family. And thus Genseric discovered the third and last nude statue for the support of his Prussian crown at the top of his Carthaginian palace — of New Potsdam!
CHAPTER XII
Genseric as Augustus — Christianity and its warring creeds— German tribes become Arians — Constantine head of the Church.
II 7 HEN Genseric made his triumphal entry into Rome, sacked it; carried back to Carthage an empress and her two daughters; compelled one of them to marry his crown prince, and thus linked himself matrimonially with Augustus Caesar — what more simple than to de- clare himself Imperator of Europe and Africa. He was now between fifty and sixty years old — about the same age as William II., when his troops in Belgium noisily acclaimed him as Kaiser von Europa. And like William II. he was a pious Christian. But it is hard to be a pious Christian and not desire to exterminate heresy. Even William II. drew with his own hands a cruel cari- cature of the gentle Buddha and had it scattered
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throughout the world in order to arouse the hatred of his subjects against an oriental people of con- spicuously peaceful habits. On this cartoon the Oriental sage was depicted as a monster, whilst a Christian saint was attacking him with a huge sword. Thus William II. entered China as Gen- seric entered Morocco. Both were pious, and both inaugurated their colonial careers by stir- ring up religious rancour and dispossessing the original inhabitants — the one at Carthage, the other at Kiao-Chow. They both achieved the first conquest without firing a shot, but neither knew that the conquest of the human heart is one much more important than that of mere square miles.
Africa was ablaze with domestic war when Genseric placed the Imperial crown upon his head — a war of Christian against Christian — a war that had its beginning in the first doctrinal sermon and that spread to the ends of the Christian world so soon as the creed of Athanasius had been accepted by the first general council of the Catholic Church in the reign of the Emperor Constantine.
This Emperor founded Constantinople. The
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Catholic Church honours him as the official patron of Christianity, although he died a heretic and lived the life of an orthodox politician to whom all creeds were indifferent save in so far as they supported his Imperial throne. This is the same Constantine of whom mention has already been made — who saw in the heavens during some battle a monstrous cross, and also illuminated letters: In hoc signo vinces. He won the battle and sub- sequently humoured the Christians by ornamenting each regimental labarum by the symbol of Chris- tianity rather than by the pagan emblems for- merly in vogue. A cynic might amuse himself by tabulating in one column the victories gained by Roman legions when inspired by love of liberty under pagan generals, and then in a second column the number of victories secured by fol- lowing the labarum of the saints. But this would lead us too far when I am hurrying to explain why Constantine called the first great council at Nice (in Asia Minor); why he placed himself as a super-pope to formulate the faith of the Christian world and then to resume his sceptre of super-Kaiser in order to see that all his sub-
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jects obeyed, not only the policeman, but the priest as well. And so, when you hear the Athana- sian Creed rapidly repeated by a minister of the gospel, you may have difficulty in understanding its mystic allusions, but probably more still in learning that this beautiful piece of liturgy has been the cause of more bloodshed amongst Chris- tians than has been shed in the whole pagan world from the days of Romulus and Remus to those of Anus and Constantine.
There were hundreds of holy men throughout Europe, Asia, and Africa, who lived only for the glory of the true faith and the triumph of Christian- ity. They worshipped in many ways, according to climate, education, and political environment. Many went as missionaries amongst the Barba- rians, many practised asceticism after the Hindoo manner of seeking lonely retreats in the desert of Egypt, the mountains of Asia Minor, or the islands of the ^Egean Sea. The gospel sounded differently in the Atlas Mountains amongst the ferocious Kabyle than it did when preached to domestics and slaves on the shores of the Bos- phorus or the Tiber.
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The German tribes had thousands of Christian captives, and the Germans then as now have as- siduously cultivated the dress, manners, language, and external forms of their more civilised neigh- bours. The German of today, whilst cursing his enemies in Gothic guttural, has, nevertheless, a vocabulary that would be poor indeed were it not that the tongues of Shakespeare and Corneille have been plundered for conversational material. This has been made painfully apparent since the Prussian Government commenced an official boy- cott of all unpatriotic or un-German words. This crusade has but raised into relief the broad fact that for centuries the German has had to go abroad not only for the elegancies of life but for the very words by which they can today be described.
It was natural, therefore, that the Vandals, Goths, Huns, and the dozens of other tribes that lived in semi-dependence on the Imperial bounty, should learn Latin and Greek; should gratify their vanity by wearing costly clothing made by fashionable tailors and in the course of time come to regard their good old God Thor and his clumsy hammer as a crude equivalent for a religion which,
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in the days of Const antine, celebrated the myster- ies of Christianity in churches of noble proportion, ministered to by priests famed for scholarship, eloquence, and supernatural powers. The Ger- man world went to sleep worshipping Thor and Odin — they awoke as Christians. We have no date to fix exactly this interesting transforma- tion, but when we reflect that, only twelve centu- ries later this same Germany lay down to rest in the faith of Rome and woke to worship the teach- ings of Martin Luther, why should we be aston- ished? It is not necessary that we hear of any individual act of conversion through the force of reason. To the Prussian of Luther's time as to those of Constantine's it sufficed that the order came from their military chief or hereditary monarch — and the order for a church parade is in Potsdam no less binding on a recruit than a parade of any other kind. In the days of the great reformation a certain number of North German princes rebelled against the Roman Pope, and all their subjects did the same as a matter of course. In South Germany an equal number of princes concluded to remain papist, and, of
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course, this view was immediately shared by their subjects. There were the usual number of excep- tions; but in general, in spite of religious wars, persecutions, and auto-da-f6s innumerable the con- versions from Catholicism to Protestantism and vice versa during the five centuries since the Diet of Worms have been so few that they may be conveniently ignored.
Now it so happened that the Germans of Gen- seric's time had their baptismal water tinctured with a Christianity, which today would sound Unitarian and which at the first (Ecumenical Council of 325 was denounced as a heresy. This was unfortunate from the Athanasian point of view, to say nothing of the Orthodox Catholic party. It was the more regrettable since it might easily have been otherwise had the first German converts known or cared anything about the subtleties of a theological dispute which was tearing to pieces a brotherhood which had been inaugurated three centuries before on the Mount of Olives. The barbarian tribes would cheerfully have become Hindoos, Buddhists, or Shintoists had they been notified in time — but after the
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Council of Nice it was too late. The great Con- stantine had spoken. The Athanasian Creed was declared orthodox. The orthodox alone were deemed fit to become saints and all who favoured another creed were officially branded as criminals condemned to suffer, not merely the wrath of God on earth, but eternal damnation in a world of which neither party could speak with historical precision.
CHAPTER XIII
Religious war in North Africa — Sects and their origin then and now — Donatists — Martyrdom of Cyprian — His trial.
\ \ 7ILLIAM II. once made a speech to his recruits in which he warned them that it was their sacred duty to obey — no matter what the order might be — even to firing upon their own parents. The spirit of Genseric was in these words, although at the time we little dreamed that soldiers could be found, even in Prussia, to shoot down in cold blood a woman like Edith Cavell whose only crime was an act of mercy!
The times of Genseric resembled those of Wil- liam II. with this difference that the Prussian fanaticism of today is national, material, and political; whilst that of our Athanasians, Arians, and Donatists was metaphysical if not mystic.
In my boyhood we joked about Mormonism as
an illegal anachronism that would vanish so soon
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as railways should link Utah with the rest of North America. Railways have expanded, but so has Mormonism. Their missionaries work hopefully in the most distant fields and their Bible inspires the spirit of martyrdom amongst thousands who boast of their citizenship in a free and enlightened Republic.
Some few years ago we were wont to laugh at little groups of illiterate but very enthusiastic boys and girls who waved tambourines, sang and shouted; who dressed in burlesque military garb; addressed one another as warriors, and called sinners to repentance by exhorting the passers-by in the slums of London. And now, after only a very few years, I meet Salvation Army banners, waving not merely in the avenues of England, North America, and Australia, but in the bazaars of Calcutta and Bombay, Rangoon or Rio Janeiro.
It seems but yesterday that we blessed Mrs. Eddy for providing us with one more humorous theme — the picture of thousands receiving "ab- sent treatment" for as many ailments, and all through believing the words of a Bible whose sheets are barely dry from a rotary press. Here
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are but the three successful religions of my short life — and there are dozens attempting to compete with them, whose names I know and whose power you may feel after I am no more. The three I mention are today powerful, because they repre- sent a combination of spiritual vitality, business efficiency, and financial endowment. Today they are a living protest against systems already in force or else an attempt to follow the commands of our blessed Saviour in original if not unorthodox ways. They are today champions of free speech and of toleration, because they are feeble as com- pared with other and older religious bodies. They are just as reasonable as were the early Christians before the conversion of Constantine. All Chris- tians were modest when in a minority, but when they achieved power, they created the Inquisition and burnt at the stake whoever dared to differ with them on any article of faith.
All North Africa was Christian when Constan- tine topped his labarum with a cross, but the Christianity of Carthage ran to Puritanism, whilst that of Constantinople cared less about a bishop's concubine than the set of his surplice.
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There happened at the North African capital a contested ecclesiastical election and whilst the people of that country supported their Puritan candidate Donatus, the Court party insisted upon another bishop, whose fame was founded upon high living rather than high thinking. You who have read how a case of tea started a seven years' war between England and her American Colonies may imagine the storm that stirred from the Pillars of Hercules to the edges of Egypt, when it was learned that their pet puritan candi- date was set aside in favour of one whom they regarded as an anti-Christ. So the Moorish Christians flew to arms, and the Roman authorities were ordered to suppress a rebellion which from the Donatist point of view was wholly theological, while from that of Constantine it was political as well. Donatist bishops were seized and deported; Donatist priests were forbidden to exercise their public functions; Donatist congregations were declared illegal and their churches were handed over to Catholics or closed. Orthodox Catholic bishops now plundered the property abandoned by their rivals and seized the persons of Donatists
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with a view to reforming their spiritual notions. But the more the Catholics persecuted, the more stubborn became the Donatists, until the breach became so wide that all hope of reconciliation disappeared, and the religious war which vexed Northern Africa in the days of Constantine continued throughout the Vandal century and ceased only with the extinction of Christianity itself.
Note also that the Donatists of Genseric's days were to their brother Christians of Antioch or Rome much as a congregational community of Connecticut might appear to an Anglican bishop in the reign of Charles the First. The Catholics of the papacy became more and more Imperial in their sympathies. The Donatists, on the other hand, pushed the teachings of our blessed Saviour to their logical conclusion and little by little evolved a religion whose cardinal tenet was the brotherhood of man, along with its embarrassing corollary, the propriety of sharing all things in common. And so fast as the ortho- dox persecuted the Donatists, these in turn re- taliated with interest; and the outlying country
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districts became infested with bands of pious peasants who felt they were serving God when sacking a Catholic church and who often sacked without waiting for minute information regarding its owner. Christians butchered one another, each believing that the martyr's crown was worth all the blood spilt for that purpose. The Roman soldiers were ordered to assist the Catholic party, but soldiers rarely do such work with the vigour displayed by saints. Of course the military au- thorities would not evade their duty, but they showed in their performance a deplorable absence of the persecuting zeal. Compare, for instance, the martyrdom of Cyprian under Roman law with that of John Huss more than one thousand years later. Cyprian was an African bishop of the Christians, who preached half a century before Constantine and who attracted the ill-will of patriotic Romans by advocating doctrines of a pacifistic and therefore disloyal nature. The patriots loudly clamoured for his indictment as a traitor or at least his internment as an undesir- able demagogue. All other religions respected the temporal head of the state excepting only
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the Catholic hierarchy, of which Cyprian was the most eloquent and most aggressive champion. Every subject of Rome paid obeisance to Caesar after the manner we employ in swearing allegiance to the United States Constitution. It was the law of the Roman Empire, and whoever refused to comply was deemed disloyal. The law differs little from similar laws in every state even to our own time, and the present war has taught us that we would have done well had we dealt with our disloyals of today as Rome did with Cyprian. This bishop knew the law well, but he knew also that his fame waxed in proportion as he defied the power of a pagan potentate, and so he kept on abusing the head of the state, preaching socialistic subversion of constituted authority, and courting the fame of a Christian martyr. And so it hap- pened that, after several years of immunity, the legal machinery of Rome was reluctantly set in motion and St. Cyprian was summoned for trial on charges not far different from those which might send to jail many demagogues who are obstructing our government today. Cyprian was not rudely arrested and locked up; on the contrary
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he was invited by the Roman governor, or viceroy, to call upon him in his private council chamber where he communicated to him the instructions he had just received from his government — namely that the Roman law tolerated none who were dis- loyal to the practices and ceremonies of their an- cestors. Cyprian, of course, protested that he was a Christian and gloried in a religion superior to that of his Emperor. In consequence he was sen- tenced to banishment — to a pleasant seaside town about forty miles from Carthage where every con- venience, not to say luxury, was accorded him; where he was allowed full liberty of correspond- ence with brother Catholics throughout the world and receiving the visits of his faithful.
Here he stayed but a short while — his sentence was allowed to become a dead letter and in less than a year he returned to his home in the neigh- bourhood of Carthage. Throughout these pro- ceedings we discover on the part of the Roman authorities methods that might characterize the languid procedure of a well-bred colonial British governor called upon to punish some conniver at a suttee on the Ganges or a devil dance on
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the Zambesi. A courtly pro-consul would relish the company of so eloquent and original a guest as the Carthaginian Christian; he would shrug his shoulders amiably over the amusing fables, which inspired the zeal of Cyprian, and he would wonder why the Metamorphoses of Ovid were not equally edifying to all patriotic subjects of Rome. Of course he had to obey when ordered to exe- cute the law, but he did so in a way that offered the saint every opportunity of saving his life by flight and concealment.
From Rome came finally a warrant for the execution of rebels, and all knew that Cyprian would be honoured as the best of them — or worst. He did not dare save his life by flight, any more than an officer leading his men out of the trenches or a skipper on the bridge. His whole life had been but a preparation for this; and a recantation at such a time would have made him a Judas Iscariot in the eyes of his fanatical flock — and a corpse into the bargain ; for his own people would have murdered so flagrant a renegade. But since he would not make the escape so temptingly offered, he was placed under arrest with every
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mark of honour. Two officers of rank conducted him from his palace — not to a prison, but to the handsome home belonging to one of them. A splendid banquet was made in his honour. His friends were not only welcomed, but were even encouraged to smuggle him away from a scene that was perhaps more painful to his Roman judges than to his fanatical followers.
Next morning he was once more offered a hearing; the sentence was read ; his judges begged him to save his life by merely conforming to the law of the land; all in vain. He was led out to execution escorted by a crowd of his admirers. These were not hindered from showing him acts of devotion; assisting him in removing his upper garments; catching his blood for the relic mongers and finally burying the body with full honours. The Roman guards protected their episcopal prisoner from insult at the hands of over-zealous patriots and in every other way manifested the disinclination of well-disciplined men to do more than what was ordered in a matter of which reli- gious fanaticism formed so large a part. And if you will bear in mind that Cyprian was exe-
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cuted in the third century after Christ; and that hundreds of bishops had been preaching sedition in and about Carthage; and that Rome had looked on indifferently whilst her laws were being slighted; and that up to this time no one had been punished for such crimes — should we not marvel that the fate of Cyprian was so long de- layed and that Roman good nature was so blind to the forces that were undermining her Empire?
CHAPTER XIV
Pagan and Christian procedure contrasted — John Huss and his followers — John Nepomuk.
TN the preceding chapter I dwelt at some length upon the manner in which pagan Rome treated St. Cyprian in order that you might for yourselves note how much more merciful, digni- fied, and civilised was this procedure than that which was typical of trials in which Christians accused one another of analogous crimes. You no doubt recall the procedure that caused Louis XVI. and Charles I. to lose their crowns — and then- heads; perhaps you have heard of the indignities heaped upon the ex-President of our so-called Confederate States after our great Civil War — even to putting chains upon him like a felon! These three instances are recent and of equal notability with the trial of Cyprian. In each
case the prisoner was charged with a purely
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political offence and in each case he was treated with a severity, not to say brutality, that would have shocked the decencies of those who tried the Catholic saint of Carthage.
Perhaps I should have illustrated this matter by recalling some typical trial in which the majesty of the Catholic Pope was prosecutor and the prisoner another Catholic bishop — charged with heresy — which is a technical word equivalent to treason or lese majestt in a political court. Compare then the pagan prosecution of St. Cyprian in the fourth century with the Christian prosecu- tion of the equally pious and beloved John Huss one thousand years later — an interval so rich in saintly activity that we should be justified in looking for a bench of judges equal at least in mercy to those that sat in the days of pagan Rome.
John Huss is the father of Bohemian literature and of her national conscience. He lived a cen- tury before Martin Luther and frankly followed the spiritual banners of the English reformer Wyclif . He was a profound scholar and owed his influence, like Cyprian, to the purity of his life
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and the eloquence with which he expounded the living gospel to a people noted for their domestic virtue, their idealism, and their intelligence. He spoke to them in their own tongue and also wrote popular hymns — in short he was one of those rare and sublime figures that reconcile one to the com- forting hypothesis that our blessed Saviour ap- pears in our midst when a living witness to the Truth is needed. You may read the interesting life of John Huss elsewhere, for in this book about Genseric I have but space to mention so much as throws light upon the religious fanaticism that flamed under papal protection and produced a priesthood, whose credulity was equalled only by its cruelty. The Roman Pope who tried Huss for heresy (John XXIII.) had like many another saint passed his youth in sounding the depths of human depravity before passing judgment on the more edifying if less tangible beatitudes of the future life. Pope John had been a Neapolitan pirate; and, consequently, we are not surprised to learn from a sympathetic German scholar that when he subsequently stepped from the quarter- deck of a corsair to the palace of a cardinal he
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promptly seized upon the throne of St. Peter by the simple process of poisoning the holy incum- bent who blocked the path of his ambition. Of course he needed money; for merely poisoning the Pope in power does not necessarily guarantee the votes of one's brother cardinals, and there were heavy election debts outstanding. Also there was a war, which John waged against the Catholic King of Naples, and in order to make a new income tax popular, he described this as a crusade and sent his agents to collect money. But even amongst the faithful it is not always easy to impose taxes unless one can show that the purpose is holy or that some present gain be forthcoming. Few in Bohemia took any interest in a war conducted by a Neapolitan pope against a Neapolitan king, and John Huss had by this time so purified the religious minds of his people that they were repelled rather than edified by the papal agents who promised them forgiveness of sins in exchange for their cash. The King of Bohemia and the chief nobles sustained the bold reformer, but the Vatican denounced him as heretic and demanded his presence in court that
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he might be formally tried by a man who insolently pretended to hold power of attorney from the Father of Justice and Mercy.
The King of Bohemia made the Pope promise that John Huss should have free passage to and from the Council of Constance — but the Pope broke this promise. Huss came to Constance relying on the holy father's promise and was by his orders there seized and kept in close con- finement, in spite of indignant protest from the King and his chief nobles. And in order to baffle any plans that might be laid for his rescue, the Pope had him secretly shifted from one prison to another and finally brought for trial in the presence of a notoriously bitter enemy, who brought no serious charge against him, but de- manded unconditional recantation of all that had made his life precious in the eyes of humanity.
John Huss would not recant and he was therefore immediately dragged to the stake and burned, with every circumstance calculated to make him ridiculous or odious to the spectators. Tradition tells us that the smile of our Saviour illumined his face as he gazed upon the ignorant peasants
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bearing the fagots for his martyrdom. It was in pity that he said of their labour: "0 sancta simplicitas!" And as the smoke and flame com- menced their work of hellish (or holy) torture his spirit made its last earthly effort in a sweet hymn of praise. The pagan Romans gave every facility to those faithful who desired to honour Cyprian on the scaffold and afterwards. The Christian judges of John Huss not only tortured their prisoner to death but pursued him into the next world by scattering upon the waters of the Rhine not merely his ashes, but even the soil beneath his roasting place. His books were de- stroyed, his every word and thought were con- demned, and his soul was consigned to a Catholic hell, by order of an infallible pope. In parenthesis you may discover for yourselves that this same pope was soon afterwards himself deposed and tried on several dozen criminal indictments. But since none of these charges included the preaching of Bible truths, John the XXIII. was forgiven and died in a palace at an age which permitted him to reflect on the vicissitude of human life and above all the curious fate that put pirate John upon a
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papal throne and the Christ-like Huss upon a blazing wood-pile.
But John Huss, like John Brown of Ossawatomie, had a soul that would not die, and for many years the day of his martyrdom was throughout Bohemia held as a national day of mourning. The peas- ants and their lords flew to arms when the papal forces marched into Bohemia for the purpose of smothering the great Protestant movement started by the burning of Huss. The Protestant forces resisted successfully every attack, and in the course of a war covering fifteen years they carried their victorious banners even to the heart of Germany. But kings and nobles wearied of perpetual war and the papacy became concilia- tory with a view to gaining time. Also we must note that the John Huss Reformation produced in Bohemia what the Donatist movement pro- duced in Northern Africa, what the Lutheran movement did in Germany, and what to some extent happened in the American Colonies after having achieved independence; namely, that many lawless elements ranged themselves under Hussite banners and brought discredit to their cause by
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making plunder a conspicuous feature of their programme.
The papal church waited patiently until the dread of war haunted every heart and a new gene- ration had arisen that knew not Huss and believed what the new priests told them. Little by little statues of St. John Huss disappeared and in their places appeared a St. John Nepomuk. The new St. John was a Jesuit, and in order to make him popular the priests invented a fable very precious to the papacy — if only the people could be made to give it credence! Every pulpit was made to proclaim the merit of this alleged saint, who chose to die the death of a martyr rather than betray a secret confided to him in the confessional. It was a noble story — if true. There were miracles certified by apostolic seals credited to this mythical rival of John Huss. Witnesses deposed that John Nepomuk was bound hand and foot and thus tossed into the Moldau at Prague by a cruel king. But he did not sink. On the contrary he floated serenely down into the Elbe, past Dresden and Magdeburg to Hamburg and Heligoland. The journey is nearly one thousand miles, and the
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current is a gentle one — consequently we would have expected frequent mention of this interesting corpse floating face upwards on a stream which then, as now, had many populous towns on either bank and floated thousands of well-manned ships. Then too the orthodox fable tells us that a halo formed round the head of the saint and five bright stars hovered over him on this interesting river trip.
If any one doubts let him but visit the magni- ficent church in Prague dedicated to Nepomuk; let him note the statue of this latter-day saint upon every bridge in Catholic Germany; let him mix in the crowd of pilgrims who annually drop their pennies at his miracle-working shrine, and let him reflect that the ancestors of these very pilgrims gladly gave their blood and treasure for the real patron saint of Bohemia — a martyr in the cause of a spiritual religion — the immortal John Huss.
CHAPTER XV
William II. and Genseric as colonists — Metz and Carthage — Expedition of Majorian — Disaster in Carthagena — His end — Also some thoughts on Mayor Mitchel and Majorian.
O RUSSIA had been master of Elsass-Lothrin- gen or Alsace-Lorraine for about the same number of years that Genseric ruled in North Africa, when I happened to be in a crowd of French- speaking citizens of Metz, listening to William II. making a German speech to a people held only by the sword and praying each day for deliverance from its dominion. Never had I heard the Kaiser grind out his gutturals more snappishly; never had I seen his face and manner disclose so much malevolence; never had I seen him clutch the hilt of his sabre in a manner so suggestive of puni- tive purpose. He had shown me his friendly and human side for twenty-five years, but on this occasion he spoke as Genseric might have done
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when laying the corner-stone of his neues Palais amidst an audience of his newly conquered subjects of Carthage.
"German you are," snarled the Kaiser at Metz, "German you have ever been and German shall you ever remain — so help me God and my good sword."
As I am quoting from memory, a word or two may have been otherwise; but the brutal manner in which a brutal boast was brutally aimed at the heads of a subject civilian population impressed me ominously, nor was I surprised to hear through- out that French-speaking crowd indignant mur- murs which betrayed eloquently the failure of Prussian colonization, after forty years of severely conscientious methods — the same that have made the name of Prussia hated in Denmark and Poland to say nothing of equatorial Africa and the is- lands of the Pacific. Genseric was successful as a colonist to the same extent that William II. has been. He too rattled his sabre and built churches and monuments to Prussian Kultur; but even after the sack of Rome and many other successful raids, by which he added much new territory to
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his empire, he found that the cost of keeping his conquests in order grew daily heavier, and that it was easier to make corpses than friends.
The Roman Empire of the West was nearing its term of greatness; but as often happens in a decadent society it produced an Emperor in the person of Majorian who for a brief four years (457-461) permitted his contemporaries to under- stand how Rome had reached her greatness in the days of Scipio and how inevitably she was moving towards inglorious pacifism. Majorian undertook a campaign against Genseric to avenge the sack of Rome, the rape of an Empress, and the ruin of a great province. Had he united all the forces of East and West and had the leader been a Julius Caesar, our story would have closed with this chapter. But Majorian had among his sub- jects more priests than patriots and, therefore, was compelled to perpetuate some old abuses by recruiting his army, as did George III., from amongst the mercenary Germans who hovered on his border and who entered Roman service in a spirit of loyalty similar to that which has flooded the counting houses of London and New York,
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Cape Town and Calcutta with young Germans who ask little and learn much, who have the train- ing of soldiers and are doubly useful to their fatherland in case of war. Under the banners of Majorian marched barbarians of every tribe between the Black Sea and Belgium — Gepidae, Ostrogoths, Rugians, Suevi, Alani, Burgundians, and Huns. They took pay to kill their fellow Germans of Africa just as much in the way of business as when Bavarians and Hanoverians fought against Prussians no later than 1866. Kaiser Genseric had raided the Italian coast, be- tween Rome and Naples in the year of Majori- an's accession (457), but had been driven back to his boats in such bloody rout that amongst the dead was found a brother-in-law of the Vandal King. Genseric was, therefore, on his guard, and spent much money in propaganda work, so that his general staff in Carthage knew more about Roman armaments than did the officials in Ravenna — indeed we may say today that .William II. knew, in 1914, more about American inefficiency at our seat of government than did our own statesmen. But Majorian worked well
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at his task and himself led the army over the snow-covered passes of the Alps, through France, to Spain, and finally assembled his host in the port of Carthagena ready for the descent upon Carthage. Genseric was alarmed, for in Majorian he recognized a soldier whom he could not hold off by offers of a peace conference; whom he could not humbug by signing treaties and, above all, who was a patriot who knew that no per- manent peace was possible so long as Carthage, the Mediterranean key, was in German hands. But the stars were with the Germans and so were the forces of disloyalty amongst the mercenaries of Majorian. Genseric was kept well posted, and by the joint aid of treason and his own swift galleys, Carthagena was surprised and the great Roman armada dispersed — the work of years wrecked in a few hours — and Genseric hurrying to his palace in order to make a speech from the balcony, in which he would boast that God had helped him because his cause had been righteous. We see him taunting the captive Eudoxia with the failure of her Roman kin, and we see the Crown Prince Hunric offering the wife whom he
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had enslaved, a gift of loot from the Roman camp.
Majorian might have returned to Italy after this disaster; created another army and navy; called upon the people to do their duty, and in a second campaign profited by the lessons of the first. But the very measures which he had taken for the good of his country raised up ene- mies amongst priests and politicians — and the disaster at Carthagena was eagerly seized upon as a means of doing to death a patriotic Emperor whose unpardonable crime consisted in hindering those whose activities were inspired by thirst for plunder and power. Majorian had passed sweeping laws for the protection of agricultural communities against rapacious tax collectors; he had imposed checks on arbitrary action in vil- lages and towns; he had arrested those who made much money by selling the magnificent monu- ments of ancient Rome as quarries of ready-cut building stone. The many politicians who then as now regarded public office as a means of bet- tering themselves submitted silently but sullenly to the reforms of Majorian. They might in time
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have been reconciled to the better laws, but not so the Catholic Church. The papal court then as now can close an eye to any crimes affecting only individuals and states; such crimes, let us say, as the massacre of St. Bartholomew; the plot to murder an English queen; the rape and massacre of Belgian girls and inoffensive civil- ians. These in the eyes of Rome are mundane and transitory. But a pope never pardons the patriot who deems loyalty to his country as the first duty of a citizen. Rome never pardons the French Republic for compelling priests to obey the law; she has not pardoned Italy for separating church and state ; the King of England is today excommunicate and his Catholic subjects are encouraged in acts of rebellion.
Even as I write, the metropolitan city of the Western World has had a warning example of what it means for a public official to obey the laws of his country, when thereby he may expose the wrong-doing of a priest. John Purroy Mitchel has just been defeated at the polls of New York, although he reluctantly permitted his name to appear a second time as candidate for mayor
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His first term proved him to be not only a patriotic and intelligent public servant, but in addition a man of broad political vision, and of brilliant capacity as a writer and speaker. He was the unchallenged choice of every important political, industrial, or social organization in New York, and men of clean lives concluded with plausible reason, that not only would he be re-elected as mayor, but that in view of his excellent record in the past, he would naturally be the people's choice for any subsequent honour to which his ambition might aspire.
Imagine then the stupefying sensation caused by the news in November of 1917, that Mr. Mitchel had been defeated overwhelmingly and that the successful competitor bore a 'name of which nothing was known, save that he was agree- able to such political elements as are disloyal.
The Pope in Majorian's day sought vengeance against one who had checked certain abuses of priestly power — who, for instance, forbade any woman from definitely becoming a nun until she had reached the age of forty. Majorian was concerned for the future of a country in which
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a fanatical church encouraged young women to escape the burdens of maternity by entering a nunnery. Young men with equal zeal were induced to escape from the labours of the field or the duty of a soldier by donning the robe of a monk and preying upon the purses and the cre- dulity of a saint-ridden community. Majorian was made the object of a silent and subterraneous attack in which the Church then as now prepared the ground carefully and launched its blow as mysteriously as that which sent the Lusitania to the bottom with its cargo of innocent mothers and babes. Majorian and Mitchel are separated by 1456 years of time but their tale is one that never is old, for it was there in the first grey dawn of history and will be repeated whenever priests presume to rule, where statesmen fear to tread.
CHAPTER XVI
Rip Van Winkle and the Seven Sleepers of Christendom— Pagan and Christian Rome — Holy Coat of Treves.
T^HE story of Rip Van Winkle is familiar to millions who laugh and cry by turns at the good-natured Dutch lad who fell asleep in the Catskill Mountains during the reign of George III. and awaked to find his hair white, his gun rotted, and his country changed into a republic. Washington Irving laid the scene of this long sleep in a wilderness which he had never visited, yet already natives of these mountains point with pious conviction to the exact spot where Rip rolled ninepins with the dwarfs or laid him down for his memorable nap.
The story of Rip, like all good stories, has been common property ever since men gathered to- gether about the family hearth and drew upon their adventures or their imagination for song
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and story. In the days of Genseric there were seven Rips — all of them saints — all of them waked from a sleep that had lasted nearly two centuries. They had escaped from Ephesus in Asia Minor when the edict against Christianity menaced them and had concealed themselves in a cave where they fell asleep after blocking the entrance with stone. They might still be sleep- ing there but for the enterprise of an inquisitive landlord who had inherited this ground and pro- posed an inventory of his property. So he pulled away the stones and let the sun stream in upon the seven young men who had lain in darkness and mental torpor for this long period. They rubbed their eyes, felt hungry, and sought to buy some food in Ephesus; but their strange garb, archaic manner, and, above all, the money that had long since gone out of usage, caused them to be arrested, haled before a tribunal of justice, and charged with being foreign spies and passers of illegal coin. But their story was soon told and was the more readily believed because of its miraculous char- acter. Thousands of the faithful flocked to the cave and were healed; and the Emperor himself
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made a pilgrimage to its sacred shades. And as in the case of Rip, the story cheered all who heard it. Mahomet wove it into the Koran, even going so far in details as to explain that God entered the cave each night and shifted the bodies about in order to prevent putrefaction. You may hear the story of the Seven Sleepers retailed in the bazaars of Delhi and the tents of Arabia — it has been traced back to earliest records in Scandina- vian folklore, and ages to come will bless the man who first made so wise a fable.
In 1864 I fell from a tree whilst at a German boarding school and was carried senseless into the house. Why should not I have been lain in a cave and remained happily innocuous for half a century? In India I heard of holy men who had been buried alive for many weeks, and subsequently professed that their mysterious re- pose had improved them spiritually. And so without here raising the question of relative holiness or even the desirability of multiplying funeral expenses permit me to consider for a moment the feelings of a normal Christian lad awaking in August of 1914, after having fallen
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asleep in the Germany of 1864. Of course he would have been arrested for seeking to pass the obsolete Groschen in lieu of the Imperial Mark, and probably pardoned and ordered to serve the equivalent of his uncompleted military time by working in some factory devoted to military equipment. He would rub his eyes and scratch his ears on learning that the little provincial capital of Berlin had become a northern Chicago and that modest little Prussia had now an Emperor who was the terror of the world. He would ask about Bavaria, Wurtemberg, and the other sover- eign states and learn that they had all been ground up in the Prussian mill and knew now no leader but the war lord of Potsdam. Then he would be told of a colonial empire with a million square miles and a navy challenging England for the mastery of the seas, and then he would listen to the Hymn of Hate, and then learn that in a moment of profound peace this Hohenzollern war lord had launched an army into Belgium and had deported the civilian population of both sexes and made them work like slaves in the fields and factories of the captor. Then he would learn
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of air raids on English seaside resorts; of killing the opposing enemy by foul gases; of sinking hospital ships and ferryboats by skulking sub- marines— and then he would be told that God was fighting for the Kaiser and his peculiar Kultur.
In 1864, Germans sang only songs of human brotherhood and happiness. They sought in- spiration in the charms of nature, the forest, the cascade, the song of birds. They read of wonders in other countries and travelled for mental and spiritual recreation. They loved France for her wit and taste; England for her well-regulated liberty; and America for the generosity with which she gave away her national domain to emigrants. They were a people threatened by none, learning from all, and welcome everywhere. Their universities were free temples dedicated to the Muses, and their many principalities became centres of scholarship, rivals only in each desiring to attract the best in music, painting, sculpture, and the drama. In those days we thought of Germania as Greece in her golden age pictured her goddess of the Parthenon. We lived in the world of Goethe and Schiller, of . Humboldt and
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the tales of Grimm; of Beethoven and Schubert; of Turnvater Jahn and Ernst Moritz Arndt. Had any one then intruded a programme for sacking London and approaching India by the gates of Bagdad we would have declared him insane, and the Prussian police would have locked him up for holding opinions contrary to sound public policy.
And yet so gradually has the educational discipline worked under Hohenzollern guidance that today all Germany worships as holy the things which in my youth were regarded as retro- grade, barbarous, and contrary to national ideals.
The story of the Seven Sleepers needs re-editing every few years in order that we may pause and trace the progress our race is making. These seven Christian saints fell asleep in a pagan world — they woke in the age of Genseric. The Catholic Church claims this fable as a sign of divine favour, yet in spite of the numberless miracles traceable to that cave, it became Mahometan three centuries thereafter and has remained Mahometan to this day. When these young men fell asleep, the world worshipped God in temples instead of in
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churches. All honoured God, all talked freely of religion, all respected religious divergences, all recognized the ruler of the state as the pro- tector of temples, and all were tolerant — for were they not all children of the same God! The world of paganism read Pliny and Cicero, Horace, Virgil, and hundreds of authors whom we emulate in vain today — whether as masters of style or doctors in the field of high thinking. The Greek world was edified by master minds in drama, history, poesy, and philosophy — thinkers and writers whom we can imitate to advantage as we do the art of Phidias and Praxiteles — imitate hopelessly. All the pagan world was divided in matters religious, as it was in matters of philo- sophy, of art, and of public policy. All the world discussed the high interests of mankind, but all the world had learned to discuss without insulting ; to differ metaphysically yet never on a point of good breeding.
The Seven Sleepers woke to a world in which saints were the product of every town and miracles the machinery by which they secured legal title. They had fallen asleep in a world where every
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gentleman regarded bathing and gymnastic exer- cise conducive to health. They woke amidst monks who boasted that their bodies were stran- gers to water and their minds to the beauties of nature. The Greeks and Romans who perfected both body and mind as a duty to God, no less than to the state, would have appreciated but partially a community in which able-bodied men and women passed their lives in idleness and filth; avoided their obligations as tax-payers; evaded military service, but made war fanatically upon works of art which they were incapable of repro- ducing. The Catholic world alone at this period numbered about 1800 Christian bishops, and clergy so numerous that it is fair to compute for the Roman state more priests than all the soldiers in all the legions. It was the world best suited to a Prussian conqueror and we must not lose sight of Genseric rubbing his hands each time that he heard of new monasteries, nunneries, monks, and miracles. He kept his own arms bright whilst encouraging the sloth and sanctity ,of his neighbours. Like William II. he built churches and was a good friend to his allies, but knew better
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than to count beads when spears and swords needed sharpening. It was in Genseric's day that the seamless garment of our Saviour was miraculously "discovered" and finally deposited in the domains of William II. Every circumstance of this preservation, discovery, and final transla- tion to Treves is cloaked in forgery. Yet even today it is being commercially exploited as a miracle-working relic, and millions of Prussian subjects have sought this shrine and been relieved - — at least of their money.
Luther thundered against this pious fraud in the sixteenth century; rival cities have com- plained to the Pope that they alone possessed the unique garment, and a commission of experts, in weaving if not in hagiology, have carefully examined the alleged wonder and certified under oath that the few fragments still extant furnish no evidence as to its material, its form, or even the nature of any seam or seamlessness. And if this reflects the intellectual state of a Catholic diocese in our time, have we any reason for apply- ing the term "dark ages" to the period of Genseric rather than to that of William II. ?
CHAPTER XVII
Genseric and Eudoxia — Her restoration — Some comments on her mother Athenais — Failure of the second great armada against Carthage.
'"PHE victory of Genseric over the Roman armada of Majorian was complete and led to a succession of embassies resulting in cash for the Vandal and professions of peace for the Empire. It was written in the stars of destiny that the sword of Genseric should be uniformly successful in battle, but that, like the Hohenzollerns, he would meet disaster so soon as that sword ceased to swing. It is popularly supposed that the Prus- sian eagle never surrenders the booty into which its claws have once penetrated — this is true if we amend the aphorism to read that Prussia grabs everything and surrenders only under compulsion. Frederick the Great grabbed and
held, but his successor lost all at the battle of
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Jena, and what he received back was owing to the generosity of England and to the winter which wore down the army of Napoleon in Russia. Since Genseric was a Prussian, we may believe that he surrendered the beautiful Empress Eu- doxia for financial reasons rather than those of chivalry — yet Eudoxia was in the pride of a matron's beauty and at this time (462) barely forty years of age. Genseric, moreover, was out- wardly the first soldier of his time; master of the seas; and now that Crown Prince Hunric was married into the family of Augustus, he deemed himself cousin to the Roman Caesars. The court of Rome sent embassy after embassy to Carthage to negotiate for the surrender of Eudoxia, but not until seven years of captivity had passed did Genseric succeed in securing the bribe he sought. The Byzantine court was compelled to acknow- ledge the validity of a connection repulsive to all save the brutal Crown Prince, and into the bar- gain, Genseric was paid a large sum as evidence of legal dowry. Thus was the Vandal rapacity gratified and also that yearning of the parvenu potentate for recognition by his peers. To be
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sure his vanity was sorely offended that the beau- tiful Eudoxia persistently repelled his amorous advances, and the length of her captivity measures perhaps the hope he sometimes entertained of her ultimate surrender. And henceforth Eudoxia is hated by Genseric with an intensity far surpass- ing any love he may ever have once entertained. She returned to her family and we need not be told that the rest of her life was dedicated to the task of preparing for war against the perfidious Prussian.
There have been many Eudoxias in history, and had Genseric been willing to depart from the Pots- dam custom, he might have made a quartette of naked beauties to support his prospective pal- ace— the fourth being Eudoxia's famous mother Athenais. Women were beautiful in those days — they were powerful also when they combined physical beauty with intellectual accomplish- ments. But when to beauty of body and mind they joined a spirit of god-like elevation, then indeed was every portal open to them. Athenais was the gifted daughter of a notable scholar of Athens, who gave her every facility for cultivat-
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ing her admirable talents. But on his death, and when she was but twenty years old, her inheritance was contested by her two brothers, who thought perhaps that her beauty and brains were portion enough. But the money which a modern maiden would have wasted on lawyers, she invested in a journey to Constantinople, where her tears, her modesty, her loss, and above all her radiant beauty appealed to the then Empress Regent, Pulcheria, who relieved her distress, and at the same time that of her brother on the Byzantine throne who would not be happy until the penni- less pagan had consented to share his bed and his throne. It was a romantic love marriage, if ever such existed, and like many another such, did not run forever in the smooth manner of our fairy books. The writer of romance, however, is always able to close his tale at the church door and lay down his pen after the hopeful words: "And they lived happily ever after!"
Athenais was a heroine of romance and her heart bubbled with warmth for all the world. To Pulcheria she was a submissive and sympathetic sister — accepting her tracts and sermons — to say
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nothing of baptism and a Christian name. Hence- forth she spoke no more in praise of Plato and the gods of Homer, but pretended interest in the flatuous fables of St. Augustine or the homo- ousianism of St. Athanasius. The philosophy buried beneath the stories of Proserpina, Eury- dice, Hercules, and Prometheus were exchanged for the doings of vulgar monks, who never bathed their bodies, yet blasphemously pretended to the attributes of holiness. To her Imperial husband she was an object of infinite charm for she relieved the boredom of his Byzantine court as no one else had ever done and made him the father of our third in the Genseric trinity. And to the people she was also welcome for her beauty, her wit, her charity, and above all for her Christian piety. And that nothing should be wanting to the romance, no sooner had she taken her seat upon the throne of Constantinople, than her two wicked brothers were summoned to court. They came and trembled, as they fell prostrate before the sister whom they had sought to harm. But she raised them in Christian forgiveness, pardoned their past behaviour, and crowned the burden of
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their shame by conferring on each a lucrative office. Let us presume that they, too, turned Christian for the sake of the salary if not of their sister, and the presumption is the more easy con- sidering how little they had to abjure!
The rest of our heroine's life is somewhat remote from the career of Genseric, as compared with that of her daughter, Eudoxia, but is inter- esting, for it illustrates how completely woman has ever had her own way when she was not bur- dened by the ballot-box, and how much she may soon lose, should the law degrade her to the level of the merely masculine.
Athenais submitted to the stupidity of the Byzantine Court and above all to the monastic monotony of the pious Pulcheria, until she was thirty-eight years old, when she pretended that a holy vision had beckoned her to visit the tomb of our Saviour, there to celebrate her escape from paganism. This pilgrimage agreed so well with her that she spent, with a brief exception, the rest of her life in the Holy City; travelling at intervals; addressing learned bodies in the purest accents of Hellas; composing essays, poems,
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dramas, and otherwise enjoying herself to the full extent of her purse, her social prestige, and above all her personal charm and talents. Wherever she went, her bounty assisted in the restoration of monuments and the founding of worthy chari- ties. She died in Jerusalem at the age of sixty, rich in experience and the gratitude of thousands whom she had benefited. Rumour says that absence from the bed of an Emperor was made up to her manyfold by consolations that were not always theological.
And now let us return to Genseric when he hears that there is a new Emperor called Leo I., reigning on the Bosphorus, and a new Emperor of the West, and that the two have finally united in a gigantic effort to drive the Vandals out of Africa. It is ten years since the ill-fated disaster of Majorian at Cartagena, six years after the restoration of Eudoxia, and forty years since the first proud landing at Tangiers. Genseric had been uniformly successful, yet like the Prussians in Alsace-Lorraine or a popular bandit in the good old days of Sicilian chaos, he lived in constant danger of a police raid or some other form of re-
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tribution. At last the happy combination oc- curred which enabled the forces of East and West to make a simultaneous descent upon the North African shores. More than a thousand warships sailed from the Bosphorus bearing a complete equipment for field or siege work, to say nothing of a hundred thousand picked men. Another force marched from the mouth of the Nile through the desert and yet another landed from Italy to the westward of Carthage. The details of the majestic armada may here be omitted be- cause of its ignominious failure for a cause that has wrecked many other armadas equally well inaugurated.
Genseric trembled for his throne until he learned that so far from selecting the best soldier for the highest command, they had entrusted this post to one whose only claim rested upon his blood relation with a Byzantine monarch. Genseric was now ripe in experience and cunning, however much his body may have wasted under the seventy years of agitated existence. He knew his enemy and, like another William the Second in a war where brute force failed of success, he flooded his
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adversaries with professions of friendship and lofty concern that blood might be spared. The wily old Vandal said he was ready to submit his claims immediately to a General Peace Conference ; indeed so eager was he for a cessation of hostili- ties that he would commence that very day to disarm if only Rome would be generous and grant him five days in which to arrange the necessary details.
And like a big stupid sentimental fool the Roman commander fell into the trap and granted the favour which seemed slight to an amateur but meant the world to a professional.
For in war imagination plays a r61e second hardly to shot and shell. The enemy surprised and taken at a disadvantage is already half beaten provided no opportunity be given to become familiar with the source of this momentary alarm. Had Genseric's promises been treated as they deserved, and had the splendidly organized allies moved swiftly upon the capital, and there dic- tated the terms of an unconditional surrender, no surprise would have been felt by those who look for the usual effects of normal causes. But
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Genseric knew his enemy and also the value of wind and weather, and before his five days were up and when the great Roman fleet lay comfort- ably crowded together, dreaming of an easy con- quest and early return to towns decorated in their honour, there appeared in the offing the long, low, swift galleys of Genseric, towing an abundance of inflammable material which bore down inevitably and with disastrous effect amidst the helpless transports from the Bosphorus. In vain did they seek escape by flight; each ham- pered the other and the flames communicated so rapidly, thanks to the west wind for which the Vandal had prayed, that in the course of a single night and with scarce the loss of a single life, Genseric once more won a crushing victory, and once more made public thanks to God as the peculiar protector of himself and his Prussian Kultur.
CHAPTER XVIII
Persecution by Genseric — Miracles of St. Augustine and St. Stephen — Idolatry of pagans and Christians— Effect of African luxury on the Vandals.
"/^ OD is with Genseric " shouted the Vandals, when they learned that the combined armies of the eastern and western empires had been scattered. His churches resounded with hallelujahs in honour of the victory; his priests made new plans for the extermination of Catholi- cism, Donatism, Paganism, and other forms of native heresy; and the orthodox joked about the alleged miracles of St. Augustine. Each sect in turn called itself orthodox and by virtue of that title proceeded to persecute all other Christians, whom they stigmatized as heretics.
The great victory of Genseric occurred in 468, and he lived ten more years of Imperial glory, blessed by his orthodox clergy, cursed by all
others, and not at all disturbed by the spiritual
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thunderbolts hurled at him by hundreds of saints with thousands of miracles to their credit. There is an old Spanish proverb defining a liar as one who pretends to enumerate all the wonders per- formed by the relics of St. Stephen, and since the learned and holy St. Augustine of Hippo and Carthage has set his seal on these, in a work written to prove the truth of Christian doctrine, and as Augustine was contemporary with Gen- seric, should we not pause for one moment to consider the author of these holy acts and then to marvel that his powers were not invoked when the fire ships of Genseric bore down upon the armada of those who had his name on their calendar of holy martyrs? Augustine himself was no amateur as a miracle maker, for within the space of two years and all in his own diocese he solemnly entered upon the pages of his monu- mental book, De Civitate Dei, seventy well-authen- ticated miracles, amongst which are three corpses called to life. Between Stephen and Augustine Genseric should have been long ago expelled from Africa as were snakes from Ireland by the legendary Patricius of Scotland — or if not expelled his death
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should at least have been one of contrition for past crimes and an edifying reconciliation with the worshippers of holy relics.
Genseric, moreover, even though ignorant of Latin, had the whole set of St. Augustine in his library and could have had his secretary translate the most edifying passages — particularly those re- ferring to the first martyr in the A eta Sanctorum.
Stephen had lain in the ground several centu- ries when a vision appeared to some farmer near Jerusalem, announcing the welcome news that if he would dig at a certain spot he would find a gold mine or better still the body of a martyr. All this happened in the days of Genseric, and you will no doubt share my surprise that this holy wave of miracles should have been held back for three centuries and then have inundated the world at a time when it was too late to do any good. It is also interesting to note that this epidemic of theological excavation occurred only after the Emperor Constantine had officially approved of idolatry under its new label and that relics were dug up just as fast as there was a commercial de- mand for them on the part of a credulous public.
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Moreover, every material difficulty in the way of pious excavations was removed by a vision — and as many more such as the particular job demanded. And thus it happened in the case of St. Stephen. Vision after vision guided the grave-digging parties from Jerusalem until the coffin of the saint was reached; when (on highest authority we learn this) the earth trembled, and an odour certified as that from Paradise rejoiced every faithful nostril and seventy-three of the ailing bystanders were immediately healed. Of course it was of the utmost importance to the promoters of this company of saintly excavators that the corpse should be legally identified as that of the man who was bruised to death four centuries ago; and it was equally important that there should be blood and bones enough on hand not merely to fructify pecuniarily his shrine on Mount Sion, but to supply at a fair profit thousands of churches throughout Catholic Christendom that to this day feel their zeal enhanced by the comforting thought that in their midst is a bone filing or drop of blood that once was part of Saint Stephen —first Christian martyr.
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It would be interesting if a statistically equipped philosopher could discover the number of Arians killed by Catholics or the number of Pagans killed by combined Christian effort — all of them martyrs in the cause of religion. The Roman Empire at home was persistently eradicating the religion of the ancients by erecting figures of saints on pedestals that once bore the statues of classic deities. The peasants who had formerly poured a libation to Pan or Demeter were now, under pain of death, ordered to burn a costly taper before a divinity, claiming to perform the same or even more, possibly at even a lower price. Idolatry was not suppressed, but the idols were renamed. The Roman emperors did what Prus- sian kaisers do in their conquered colonies — they do not change the things that matter, but they give them German labels.
Genseric spent the last ten years of his out- wardly successful life in imitating the example set by the Catholics of Christianity. He persecuted the heretics with holy joy — and under that word he included Pagans, Donatists, Catholics — all who were not Arian. His zeal burnt the brighter
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for having been converted in early life, and when he learned of his victims, burned or butchered to death, he had the satisfaction that consoled the last years of Philip II. of Spain, who insisted on the Inquisition in this world as better than eternal damnation in the next.
So soon as the Roman fleet had been dispersed, the outlying possessions of Genseric submitted once more to his rule; Sardinia, Tripoli, and Sicily paid him tribute and his galleys again raided the coasts of Asia, Greece, and Italy. He studiously cultivated the friendship of his brother barbarians in the Roman hinterland and the booty and tri- bute which filled his treasury after every sea raid served to meet the expense of his endless war against the heretics of his own land.
For half a century Genseric scourged Northern Africa — and for yet another half -century after his death his descendants continued this Prussian process. Yet in spite of scourging and dragon- nading and efficiency of the most modern kind, German colonization succeeded no better in Vandal times than in those of his Hohenzollern imitators.
The followers of Genseric were like the followers
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of William II. today — they penetrated to all parts of the civilised world as hirelings and spies, but they rarely penetrated into social circles where the word " gentleman " has a meaning to the initiate. The Prussians, under Genseric, who found them- selves suddenly masters of a wealthy Roman province could enjoy the warm baths in a luxuri- ous villa and the Moorish women who ministered to their appetites. They relished as barbarians the privilege of debauching girls of ancient lineage in whose families their fathers had been servants. They delighted in being waited upon by slaves of a higher breeding than themselves ; and who can paint the joy of a north German, strutting ferociously amid a people compelled to make way, and salute him as master. One must have visited German colonies in order to appreciate the feel- ings of these vandals when stretching their limbs at leisure amid the palaces and palm groves of Carthage and contrasting their present enjoyment with the past misery of their lives in the swamps and forests of Brandenburg.
But the Prussian, while a good worker under the lash, is of inferior fibre spiritually; and rapidly
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degenerates when permitted to eat and drink according to his appetites. It is under the drudgery of discipline that Prussia produced the Kanonenfutter of Frederick the Great, and only persistent poverty has made that land the nur- sery of docile peasants and hardy officers. Gen- seric had led his followers into a land of luxury and they readily contracted the diseases which luxury engenders ; but as barbarians, they were incapable of appreciating a society in which literature, philosophy, and the fine arts had flourished for many centuries before ever a barbarian had emerged from his Baltic wilderness. The men who beached their boats at Tangiers in 427 were amongst the elders by the time Genseric beat back the great invasion of 468, and when Genseric passed on to his German Walhalla, there were probably not more than a handful of those who had shared his youthful perils.
The Vandal conquerors were imperceptibly conquered by their Moorish and Roman slaves —and still more completely by their own appetites. The conquerors of yesterday became the volup- tuaries of tomorrow — field exercises ceased to
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interest the fashionable circles — the ranks were recruited more and more from natives and the day was thus insensibly prepared when the nation that Genseric had founded ceased to emulate his warlike virtues, forgot his courage, and imitated only his cruelty.
CHAPTER XIX
Some observations on the rise and fall of empires — Relative progress of Paganism and Christianity — Mahometanism — Buddhism — Hindooism.
HTHE Roman state had flourished for twelve centuries before it received its death-blow in the age of Genseric, and the Roman Church ruled with apparently irresistible power from this time on to that of the great Reformation in the day of Martin Luther. Dates make dull reading to some, but twelve is an easy number to remem- ber, and thus you may form some idea of the wisdom no less than the power of the mighty empire which gave laws to the whole known world over so long a stretch of time. It is not uncommon for empires to rise and extend them- selves rapidly over many countries. You may call to mind that of Alexander the Great, which reached from Macedonia to the valley of the Indus; that of Genghis Khan, from China to
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Eastern Europe; of Attila and Tamerlane and finally of the great Napoleon. Each of them represents waste if not bloodshed, and it is not always easy to determine how far the good over- balances the harm done. All the great conquerors that rise before our minds at this moment are of the Christian era, and the Empire which still merits our studious contemplation, if not our unreserved praise, is that of ancient and pagan Rome which for m9re than a thousand years made the highways of commerce safe and made her rule respectable by governing according to principles of law that are still current in our best schools of jurisprudence.
The words of our Saviour, proclaiming that he brought a sword into the world, and not peace, were sadly prophetic; and the devout Christian is perplexed by the frequent reminder that in the twelve centuries since Genseric more blood has flowed under the labarum of Jesus than was ever spilled by all the pagan legions who fought under the sign of the she wolf of Romulus. We might go one step further and offer evidence that Christ- ians have shed more blood in wars of their own
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instigation since the days of Genseric than all the rest of the world whom we speak of as heathen. Nor should we forget that the cause of Christ has rarely, if ever, been advanced through perse- cution or religious wars — on the contrary, Christ- ianity has almost wholly disappeared from those countries which in the time of Genseric and the saints were most active in the work of persecu- tion. Morocco and all of North Africa are now not merely Mahometan but are vigorously spread- ing that faith amongst the African tribes to the south. Egypt which was a nursery of anchorites and monastic mysticism is now a theological centre of Islam. The cities of Asia Minor, famil- iar to every Sunday-school through the Gospel pages and as the seats of famous synods and councils, are now parts of a Turkish Empire whose Sultan prays to Allah in a church founded by a Christian Emperor on the European shores of the Bosphorus. From the Pillars of Hercules to the Persian Gulf and the Caspian, the Koran has routed the creed of Athanasius, and made millions of converts amongst people whose fathers roasted such as hesitated to kiss a relic of St.
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Anthony. And if we go further afield, to India and China, we find there the equally melancholy traces of once flourishing churches whose Christ- ian congregations have become Hindoo or Bud- dhist and whose traces would be wholly lost but for a fragment here and there — the Nestorian tablet of North China, or the illuminating pages of Marco Polo.
Let us also ponder on the perplexing picture of such countries as have been most extensively blessed by the papal benediction — for instance Spain when her Inquisition was exterminating the best of her people and driving away those who prized liberty of conscience. Let us note that Louis XIV. systematically extirpated religious liberty and drove thousands of the best French- men to Protestant countries. You may run over the history of Christendom, from Ferdinand and Isabella to William II. of Potsdam, and if you study the periods when the papacy has been favourable to a ruler, you will have to place that ruler amongst those who have sought to spread orthodoxy by violence, by insidious propa- ganda, by the rack and the stake, in short, by
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methods odious to the gentle founder of our faith.
Were not our theological writers bound by the discipline of their divinity schools they would trace the marvellous progress of Islamism in part, at least, to the fact that the Hadjee and the Mufti do not exterminate or even persecute those of other creeds. Indeed from the very beginnings of Mahometanism there have been Christian con- gregations in many cities ruled by the Khalif, and commerce has been uninterrupted between the two worlds. The conquerors have naturally preserved privileges for themselves and done little to conceal their contempt for those who wanted a God divided into three incomprehensible parts. Their law was very easy, for it involved no meta- physical subtleties such as delighted Athanasius —indeed it involved no creed at all to a Christian, for he already worshipped the Creator of all the world, and the Koran held Jesus to be one of the many manifestations of God on earth. The Christian convert had, therefore, but to pay his tithes to the Khalif instead of to a pope; and as to the matter of frequently washing himself and
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practising prayers to the accompaniment of hy- gienic gymnastics, all this was refreshing after a course of hagiology in which saintliness was associated with dirty linen and desiccated virgins.
The Mahometan did not make a virtue of celibacy — he even permitted more than one wife. We must not, however, think of them as always polygamous; for human nature differs little the wide world over and the large majority of men have enough trouble without reaching out for the questionable glory of maintaining a harem. And besides even were a man so rich as to dream of such expansion, he would not do so, save to obviate many of the causes which today make America the classic land of bachelor maids and seekers after alimony.
But we must not wander from our theme which is to point out that while the seed of church pros- perity may here and there be enriched by spilling upon it a drop or so of martyr's blood, it would be dangerous to accept that aphorism unreservedly, because although the Christian world has been at great cost irrigating her holy ground with the blood of alleged martyrs, the heathen, or
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heterodox, world has progressed uncommonly well without such fertilizing agents.
While Spain, for instance, has persistently shrunk in proportion as she became a tool of the Pope and an agent of the Inquisition, Japan has prospered in wealth, population, territory, and prestige. Her religion is that of Buddha who anticipated the Sermon on the Mount by five cen- turies; her laws are enlightened; all creeds are protected; all nationalities frequent her ports. In the days of Taiko Sama every Christian Japan- ese was ordered to return to the practices of his ancestors on pain of death ; and Catholic martyr- ology has gloried in the addition of several Japanese to this ambiguous chronicle. But the historian must protest against regarding this act of the Tycoon other than that which sent to the gallows Booth, Guiteau, or the murderer of President McKinley. The Japanese interdicted Christians in general and Jesuits in particular, not because of their religious belief or practices, but merely because they undermined loyalty to the head of the state. The Popish priests taught the doctrine that the first duty of a subject is not to his coun-
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try, but to a foreigner, ruling on the banks of the Tiber, who blasphemously pretends to speak in the name of God and insolently proclaims re- bellion as meritorious when directed against a government which is opposed to papal suprem- acy. It was in Genseric's day that a Roman Emperor first received his crown from the hands of a Catholic prelate, and the fashion then set has been followed pretty generally by those monarchs who had something to lose by failing to conciliate the Catholic priesthood.
In Benares and Rangoon; in Singapore, Ceylon, and Calcutta; in Pekin, Tokyo — in short, wherever opportunity has offered I have sought to sound the religious feelings of those who make up more than half of our humankind. I have talked much and frankly with Hindoo and Buddhist friends on the subject nearest the heart of every man, and we never went far before it seemed to me that they were the true followers of Christ and we the people who used his holy name as a trade-mark for commercial exploitation. At home I hear priests who preach poverty; in the East I see them practising it. In China I see
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some four hundred millions of highly moral peo- ple who were taught the Sermon on the Mount five centuries before our Saviour appeared to the people of Jerusalem. These people have persisted thousands of years, holding fast to the teachings of a kindly Buddha and a wise Confucius. They have had bad rulers; have been conquered; have had internal revolution; yet in the long run they have triumphed over those who held the temporal power much as the Romans of Gaul and Italy absorbed the German barbarians who broke in upon them with violence. The people of India have dozens of religions within their border, but live in peace because like the Chinese and their neighbours of Japan they do not per- secute. The one thing which an Oriental fails to understand is a man without religion. We at home avoid religious themes in polished com- pany, because we are not yet on the spiritual plane, where we can discuss high themes without losing our temper. We have not reached even the stage when we can say that there is but one God who loves all His creatures equally. We are still floundering in the foul theological wallows
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reserved for those who insist that theirs is the only God. We have abundantly seen in the his- tory of our race that such an attitude with its persecuting adjuncts has done worse than nothing for the cause of Christ; we see millions of dollars each year squandered in missionary propaganda that is offensive to the nations who are compelled to receive these holy hirelings; we see Christian cities degraded by misery, vice, and crime, yet taxing themselves to support in Ceylon and Tokyo salaried agents who are much more pressingly needed in Chicago or New York. In other words it is the Far East that gave us the Living Christ; it is the Far East that keeps alive his teachings today; it is the Far East that is capable of once more converting us to the Golden Rule.
The kingdom of Genseric was being torn to pieces by the same religious intolerance that was wrecking the rest of the Christian world — but in the case of the Vandals the wrecking went on more rapidly — and the end was soon to come.
CHAPTER XX
Death and burial of Genseric — His son Hunric succeeds — Policy and manner of persecution — Deportation of hereti- cal bishops — Torture of women.
AISER GENSERIC died in 477, full of years and honour. He came to Africa with a hardy following of well-drilled Prussians half a century past, and in that short time had made himself master of Rome's richest if not oldest province; had achieved the mastery of the Medi- terranean; had married his son to a daughter of the Roman Emperor; had annexed Corsica, Sar- dinia, and Sicily — in short, he could close his eyes, happy in the consciousness of having done his full share in the persecution of heretics and in the founding of an empire which his son and Crown Prince Hunric could easily rule and amplify. Let us then assume that Genseric was
buried with barbaric pomp, equalling at least
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that which marked the obsequies of Alaric and his warm friend, Attila. Let us imagine a golden coffin exposed in the great hall of shells of his neues Palais, and let us mark the grief of his old soldiers as they passed his corpse and pondered on the coming reign under a Kaiser who rivalled his father in cunning and cruelty but shared little of his military genius. All Carthage wore out- ward mourning with the possible exception of the three Imperial nudities supporting his crown on the dome of his mausoleum. Today we have no trace of his grave, for he was not a saint of the Catholic Church. Had his piety found vent in the torture of pagans alone, no doubt his bones would have been discovered by means of the usual visions and the shrine of St. Genseric would today be a precious source of saintly profit — rivalling in virtue even that of St. Augustine. For the present, however, we must limit ourselves to supposing that thousands of heretics were slaughtered at the tomb of the great Genseric and every other detail attended to with orthodox respect for the dead at whatever cost to the living. The great Prussian pirate is now dead and
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buried, and I should also be allowed to rest. But since the whole Vandal empire collapsed so soon afterwards, I purpose in a few pages to in- clude a sketch of Genseric's five successors who in another half-century managed to dissipate so completely the empire committed to their charge that in less than sixty years from its founder's death, not only had Prussian rule in Africa ceased to exist, but not a Prussian could have been found in the baths and palaces where he had luxuriated not many months before.
Hunric as Crown Prince had broken into good society by breaking to his will the daughter of a Roman Emperor. The marriage of Napoleon and Marie Louise of Austria was not a love- match; even less was that of the Arian Huneric and the Catholic Eudoxia. But Huneric signal- ized his whole reign of seven years by a war of extermination against non-Arians in general, and more particularly against those who had the same creed as his wife. We have had such fre- quent occasion to use the words persecution and extermination that we must crave indulgence and remind you once more that the vast area of
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North Africa had a population of perhaps several million and that this population outnumbered that of the Arian Vandals almost in the same proportion as does that of India overtop the administrative and military whites of England. We must also remember that the native of North Africa entertains a contempt of death second only to that of a Rajput or Sikh. Consequently, while each religious raid of the Arian Vandal was outwardly successful in that the afflicted people could not withstand on the battlefield a charge of well-drilled soldiers, the victories thus won were as inconclusive as the punitive expeditions which have made the name of Germany odious in every colony of William II. The Vandal raids in North Africa were successful for the best part of a century. Heretical churches were destroyed, villages where heresy was suspected to exist were burned, crops were laid waste, and fruit trees cut to the core. The peasants took to the mountains or woods, if possible, and those caught were compelled to renounce their heresies or be roasted. Those who had wealth concealed were roasted anyway, at least to the point of confessing the
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spot where digging would prove profitable. And thus we could drag on a weary chronicle of dragon- nading such as has disgraced the reigns of many most Catholic monarchs in times relatively modern —since the days of the so-called Renaissance. Let me merely refer such as have patience to any historical study of the Thirty Years' War which killed off a full half of the whole population and left a large part of Europe barren and barbarous — and that war was conducted by Christian poten- tates for the triumph of religion.
Crown Prince Huneric entered upon his task with an energy worthy of Louis XIV. when dra- gooning his Protestant people of the Cevennes or Tilly in Magdeburg. The fanaticism of Huneric was met by fanaticism equally ferocious, and the war he waged could end only by extermination. Rome protested in many embassies, but Huneric answered with pitiless logic that the methods he was following for the abatement of Catholicism were copied from Catholic statutes applied to the extirpation of Arianism. Were man a reasonable creature as has been claimed by some optimist, the Catholics of Rome and the Arians of Carthage
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would have agreed each to cease roasting the other — but this suggestion was rejected by the Pope to whom the mere word toleration had a brimstone smell.
Wherever the Catholics had secured the upper hand, they made use of synods and councils as a means of condemning something they held to be heretical; and after securing a majority vote by fair means or foul, they proceeded to fine, imprison, exile or burn alive all who still remained in their former opinion. Huneric amused him- self by proclaiming his loyalty to Catholic tactics no less than Arian orthodoxy. So he too called a religious conference of African bishops ostensibly to debate an adjustment of minor differences. Of those who were his dupes, four hundred and sixty-six were Catholic; and when they gathered in the Convocation Hall at Carthage, they discov- ered to their terror that the presiding officer was an Arian Patriarch. But it was too late; there was a scuffle and in the confusion a few managed to escape, but all the rest were deported or exiled to distant places where they were set to hard labour and deprived of their customary
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exercises. Huneric was logical after the example of the Pope — he would tolerate none but orthodox Arians — better a colony with no population than one whose people held to another creed. It was his will that no Catholic bishop should exercise episcopal functions in his Empire and thus in the course of time that no further priests should be ordained, no congregations meet for worship — and Catholic heresy die a natural death. But the well-meant persecution of Huneric was evi- dently lacking in efficiency, for the exiled priests managed to evade the law and we are told that soon thereafter more than two hundred bishops of Athanasian activity were discovered and de- ported to some feverish neighbourhood in the island of Sardinia. It was a common sight to see long trains of men, women, and children trailing disconsolately towards a distant exile on the edge of the desert, amidst the huts of the unsympathetic moors. At night they were rounded up like cattle and watched by their mounted guards; and the march continued for weary weeks after the manner of Russia in my youth, deporting to Siberia all those who thought
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otherwise than the orthodox ruler. It is well to treat with caution official records, however de- tailed, when they outrage our ideas of probability. Also bear in mind that the bulk of historic material comes from Catholic victims of Vandal oppres- sion. We might frequently hesitate accepting the testimony of even orthodox saints, were it not that measures which disgraced the reigns of Genseric and Hunric have been applauded when executed a thousand years later in the name of religion and at the centre of an enlightened Europe. Huneric systematically searched out the heretic by means identical to those employed in Catholic Spain against Jews, Mahometans, and other heretics. The Arian inquisition com- menced by fine and imprisonment which helped fill the treasury, but did not materially affect the number of heretics. If the victims remained true to their creeds, torture was introduced; and we have the picture of most respectable citizens, their wives, their daughters — even the conse- crated virgins — stripped naked before the inquisi- tors, hung up by the wrists and then weighted at the ankles in order that the pain might result
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in recantation. If this was not enough, their bodies would be burned at the tenderest parts with hot irons, their right hand cut off, their ears or nose mutilated; and frequently in vain. How many were thus done to death history says not, although there is authentic record of at least one bishop and a pro-consul who died rather than recant under torture. Add to this a crusade of the Arian priests, who employed physical violence to baptize their captives and afterwards punished them for apostasy if they did not abide by that odious act. Indeed the reign of Hunric would have earned him a seat beside Philip II. of Spain, and an apostolic blessing reserved for the grandest of inquisitors had his efforts been directed in favour of Papists.
CHAPTER XXI
Belisarius lands in Africa — Enters Carthage in triumph — Is welcomed as deliverer — The Vandal army dispersed— The last of their kings killed — The usurper a fugitive.
DELISARIUS has been seized upon by paint- ers, poets, novelists, and writers of opera so recklessly that he seems unsuited to the pages of sober history. Here, however, I must present him as one of the great soldiers of all time — one of those rare leaders who have combined the art of war with that of administering wisely a con- quered people. Like Genseric he was bred in the camp, and like him spent his early life in perfect- ing the great art of conquering an enemy in the field and making his conquest of mutual advantage as soon as peace was declared. This is the man who, in less than a century from the sack of Car- thage by Genseric, routed the armies of his de- scendant under these same walls, scattered the
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Vandals forever, and re-established the sway of Imperial Rome over the whole of North Africa.
Belisarius was not of distinguished parentage and must have owed his rapid advancement to merit, for before his thirtieth year he had held many commands successfully, and at an age when in our service an officer would barely be considered equal to a company, he was entrusted with the sole command of the third and final expedition against the Vandal Empire in the Mediterranean.
It was a small force compared with those which had been previously sent against Genseric, but the commander-in-chief was prepared for such treach- ery as had wrecked at Cartagena the fleet of Majorian; and there was little fear that he could fall into such a snare as was laid by Genseric for the fleet that was burned in sight of Carthage in 468. Belisarius knew his enemy and banked wisely upon the general discontent. His advance agents prepared large supplies for his army in Sicily and secured there a friendly base of opera- tions. The people of North Africa, to whom Prussian rule had meant only a hateful adminis- tration if not active persecution, were prepared to
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accept with resignation any invasion calculated to rid, them of their German oppressors. But when they were assured by trusted messengers that Belisarius would approach their shores as a friend and protector, the cause of the Vandal Kaiser Gelimer was already half lost.
Belisarius came in 534 with only fifteen thousand fighting men, five thousand horses, and six hundred ships. The force was small, but he had picked his men and made up by genius and discipline what was lacking in numbers. Before his fleet had cleared the Bosphorus, he illustrated what he meant by discipline when the bodies of two men were seen dangling from a yard arm and the in- formation flew from ship to ship that this was their punishment for having killed a comrade in a drunken brawl. He was equally severe on such as were discovered cheating the army in the matter of rations or other supplies. In short, shocking as this statement must be to Prussians who invaded Belgium in 1914, the army of Beli- sarius landed on the African coast and in a march of nearly a fortnight reached the capital without molesting a single young woman or robbing so
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much as a hen roost. The people were amazed at a general who treated his word of honour as a sacred bond; and to find a parallel in modern times, we would have to recall the rage in Potsdam when England fulfilled her promise and marched to the rescue of mutilated Belgium in August of 1914. Belisarius counted on the neutrality if not secret aid of that portion of the population that had suffered most from Arian persecution; but he found support also in the party that regarded Gelimer as an usurper on the Vandal throne. The legitimate successor, a son of the Imperial Roman Eudoxia, and grandson of a Roman emperor, had been deposed by Gelimer, his nephew. It is difficult to ascertain the exact reason for this act — it is not easy to say even why Bismarck was dismissed by William II. Whatever ground Gelimer alleged, they were not credited in the Byzantine Court — on the contrary the Emperor Justinian felt personally affronted by the insult offered to his Imperial cousin by a barbarian usurper. But Gelimer had, no doubt, been coached by the Carthaginian Treitschkes into a contempt for Roman menaces; he knew
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that all previous efforts had failed and was con- fident that a third would end in similar discom- fiture, so he kept his Imperial predecessor under lock and key for three full years and treated with rudeness every embassy which came to remon- strate on this matter.
But when Gelimer had lulled himself into the pleasing belief that the luxury-loving Romans would never attempt to execute their threats and when his forces were much dispersed throughout his perpetually restless frontiers, Belisarius, with a secrecy and celerity worthy of the Great Napo- leon on the eve of Jena, made his landing; re- ceived the submission of one city after the other; acknowledged the services of loyal deputations; paid in coin for all supplies purchased ; encouraged the natives to bring their wares to market as in time of peace; and after a few pitched battles, in which Auerstadt and Jena were anticipated, and a Prussian army scattered like a frightened flock of sheep, Belisarius entered the enemy's capital amidst the grateful acclamations of those to whom any change would be for the better. And here again the analogy of 1806 and 534
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obtrudes itself, for the rapidity with which Napo- leon entered Berlin after Jena is recalled by the success of Belisarius from the moment he touched the soil of Africa to that in which he restored the rule of Justinian in Carthage. In each case the conqueror was acclaimed as a deliverer, or at least occupied the enemy's capital with scarce a struggle after the first short and sharp shock of arms. In each case the king of the invaded country lost control of his men and became a fugitive in his own land. Frederick William III. skulked from one hiding place to another until he finally found shelter in a Russian camp; and Gelimer was so completely outwitted by the Roman general, that whilst he was marching from Carthage against an imaginary force, Beli- sarius was marching in and ascending the throne vacated but a few hours before by the last of the Vandal Dynasty.
Gelimer 's last act was one of cruelty to his deposed kinsman — the legitimate king. He or- dered him killed along with many of his house, who shared a common dungeon. This murder was more than a crime — it was a monumental
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political blunder — for it removed every obstacle to Roman occupation, by removing the one ruler whom Justinian had formally proclaimed as le- gitimate. Prussian brutality, Prussian efficiency — these had conquered an African Empire under Genseric. But brutality and efficiency could not make the conquest of permanent value without that divine spark which God appears to have omitted when creating bipeds suitable to a Baltic wilderness. And so you see that the bungling diplomacy which characterizes Prussia today is only the recrudescence of manners and methods that saved civilisation from the Vandal in 534-
CHAPTER XXII
Gelimer captured and carried to Constantinople where he adorns the triumph of Belisarius and is generously welcomed by Justinian.
\ \ JE have now reached the last phase in this tale of Prussian ambition, the conquest of Africa — the place in the sun, the lordship of the world. We are now considering the fugitive King Gelimer, the last of the African Vandals, the man who but yesterday sat on the throne of his grandfather, Genseric. Even to this day, travellers in Mauretania and the Atlas Mountains are surprised by the sight of natives whose fea- tures have little in common with the orthodox Kabyle or Moor and still less the negro elements of the Dark Continent. These people have for- gotten their Gothic language, their Arian creed, and the very name of Genseric. They might not even have ever heard of Germany and the cradle of their ancestors but for a speech made ten years
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ago at Tangiers by William II., who claimed to be the protector par excellence of that country and the Moslem faith. We are writing at a moment when this boastful Hohenzollern is mourning the loss of every square foot of colonial territory in Africa, over which the Prussian war flag waved triumphantly in the spring of 1914; and there is something grotesquely parallel between the rapid rise and fall of German Imperialism in our day and the Genseric Empire fourteen centuries ago.
Gelimer first sought flight by water and had gathered together a flotilla loaded with treasures of which perhaps the most precious were the ornaments of the Temple at Jerusalem, once proudly borne to Rome by Titus, then seized by Genseric when he sacked the City of the Caesars in 455, and finally deposited by Belisarius at the feet of Justinian and Theodora in Constantinople.
The Roman commander-in-chief practised the greatest of all the military maxims, by giving the enemy no breathing space until every avenue of escape had been occupied and the last spark of resistance stamped out. While therefore he
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was yet organizing the civil government from his court of Carthage, his ships were swiftly occupy- ing every port on the coast between Tripoli and Tangiers, and his cavalry made a network of police posts throughout the interior. One of his gen- erals soon tracked Gelimer to his hiding place in the Numidian Mountains where he was immedi- ately surrounded and summoned to surrender. The Vandal refused, having perhaps a premoni- tion that the murders and tortures of which he had been guilty would be remembered against him in spite of Roman promises. Let us quote the Roman general, for his promises were not Prussian. Pharas was the name of the general, and he wrote thus to Gelimer: "Like yourself I am an illiterate barbarian, but I speak the language of plain sense and an honest heart. Why will you persist in hopeless obstinacy? Why will you ruin yourself, your family, and nation ? Is it the love of freedom and abhorrence of slavery? Alas, my dearest Gelimer, do you think it a disgrace to be the subject of Justinian ? Belisarius is his subject, and we ourselves, whose birth is not inferior to your own, are not ashamed
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of our obedience to the Roman Emperor. That generous prince will grant you a rich inheritance of lands, a place in the Senate, and the dignity of patrician. Such are his gracious intentions and you may depend with full assurance on the word of Belisarius. So long as Heaven has con- demned us to suffer, patience is a virtue, but if we reject the proffered deliverance, it degenerates into blind and stupid despair."
In Gelimer's letter, rejecting the Roman offer, he has these words referring to Justinian: "He has sent against me, I know not from whence, a certain Belisarius who has cast me headlong from the throne into this abyss of misery. Justi- nian is a man, he is a prince, does he not dread for himself a similar reverse of fortune? I can write no more, my grief oppresses me. Send me, I beseech you, my dear Pharas, send me a harp, a sponge, and a loaf of bread."
The Roman general sent these three extraordi- nary gifts and while he was familiar with such men as Gelimer who are insolent and cruel when in power but lachrymose to hysteria under mis- fortune he grieved over the apparent insanity
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of his captive, but redoubled his watchfulness for fear of simulated dementia.
Whether from the soothing effects of music or the tonic of good food or perhaps from a careful study of the Roman general's military dispositions Gelimer finally concluded that he was safer in a Roman prison than footloose in his own kingdom. It was no doubt difficult for one who habitually perjured himself and massacred his prisoners to realize that other nations did not do the same thing. The Prussian of today wonders why their enemy does not sing Hymns of Hate and massacre civil- ians. Gelimer never recovered from the shock of his first degradation and still less from the second one which revealed to him the generosity of his captors in contrast with his own behaviour. Swedenborg had a vision of hell which consisted of cruel and selfish people compelled to enjoy the presence and conversation of those who persist- ently strove to be kind and generous; and we may thus measure the mixed feelings of Gelimer when compelled to accept Roman hospitality at the hands of men whom he had coarsely insulted.
When Gelimer at last surrendered, he was
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escorted in honourable manner to the presence of Belisarius, who received him on the outskirts of Carthage in the midst of a vast crowd of citi- zens who looked with eagerness for the language that might be expected to fall from the lips of their late sovereign. But instead of royal words nothing came from the august prisoner but a loon-like laugh loud and discordant. Was it the effect of inward rage, shattered nerves, or the wounded vanity of a hitherto omnipotent bar- barian? He was swiftly transported to the Bosphorus and Belisarius enjoyed there a tri- umph ornamented by the magnificent spoils, which Vandal kings had collected from every port of the Mediterranean, during a hundred years in which every year marked a hundred raids. Geli- mer was in kingly purple when he approached the throne of Justinian and the crowds of Constan- tinople listened in wonder at these words which the last king of the Vandals mumbled and mum- bled after the manner of one demented or in a dream — "Vanitas vanitatis omnia vanitas"
CHAPTER XXIII
Colonial Genseric and Colonial Prussia of today — Some com- parative notes — Kiao-Chow and Papua — End of Prussian Kaiserism in Northern Africa.
/^ERMANS under Genseric were offered every opportunity to display their qualities as colonists or colonial administrators and so far from justifying any claims made by themselves or their admirers in the field of Prussian Kultur, when the regiments of Gelimer were scattered like a rabble into the Numidian wilderness, all Africa rejoiced and nothing remained but the name "Vandalism."
The Empire of William II. has been the victim of an educational propaganda, worthy of the palmy days of Jesuitism. Not only has the subsidized press and the large force of salaried functionaries assisted the government, but every pulpit, every professional cathedra, and above all every ele- mentary school has been furnished with the serum
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of German colonial destiny and with minute in- structions regarding its efficient injection. The present German of grey head and weary eyes cannot explain why his hatred of England over- tops all other hates in this war of wars. He does not know why Germany scoffed at the idea of colonies in 1871, and yearned for them a few years afterwards. His hatred and his scoffing and his yearnings have no more to do with his normal mental operations than a Catholic's belief in the bones of a saint or the efficacy of holy water. The word "Jesuit" in connection with education means that the child has been drilled into forms of belief and practice just as recruits are trained to move automatically when certain sounds are emitted by an officer. Give me the moulding of a mind during childhood and I will guarantee to make the mature product Mahometan or Buddhist, Protestant or Papist, a man of sports- manlike honour, or a servile specimen of latter- day Prussianism, who bellows the Hymn of Hate over his beer-mug and falls prostrate when the sword of the Kaiser rattles in its scabbard. When Genseric founded a German colony in
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Africa, it was greeted no doubt in every German camp as a triumph and a foretaste of what Ger- many could and would do in the near future. We have seen, however, that within the lifetime of the founder's grandchildren these forerunners of Kultur not only forgot their language and their dress, but above all, the rugged virtues which spring from poverty not to say necessity.
On my visit to the German colony of Kiao- Chow in China the most conspicuous mark of Ger- man occupation was a formidable notice-board forbidding the use of any language but that of the Kaiser, and the male population of Chinese had been arbitrarily commandeered to labour at erecting a monument in honour of the conqueror. The spirit of Genseric animated the Prussians of Shantung and no one who had seen what I saw could be surprised at the joy of the Orient when the ugly black eagle of Potsdam made way for the Rising Sun of Japan.
The Chinese language was forbidden yet I noticed that in the mess of the German officers the conquerors were compelled to practise the little English they knew in order to make their
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wants known to their Chinese victims, who have ever looked up to Englishmen as just rulers and had acquired their language as the one most useful in commercial intercourse.
One more illustration of Germany's failure to take root in the province of Shantung, I venture to note, although it is so puerile not to say incred- ible that it would best merit oblivion, save on such a theme where the religious feelings and national customs of a conquered people play so important a part. The Prussian Governor occu- pied the palace or yamen of the dispossessed Chinese commander-in-chief, and to emphasize the superiority of his Prussian military subordi- nates to all others of mankind, he reserved one door for those bearing side-arms and compelled all others to advertise their inferiority by using only what we might call the servants' or trades- men's entrance. The youngest of English coloni- als would have warned this new Genseric that he was in a country where the teachings of the gentle Buddha were in practice, and moreover he was an intruder in a province sacred to China- men as the home of the immortal Confucius; and
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that in the social hierarchy of the great Middle Kingdom, the profession of killing is not honoured —on the contrary it is relegated to the very lowest rank of necessary evils. Consequently when the venerable native of great learning and considera- tion in his own country is told by the Governor's orderly that the meanest Prussian lieutenant may take precedence of him and that when coming to an official audience he must enter by the door reserved for coolies and peddlers, he submits — but the Oriental does not forget.
Only a few years before the Hohenzollern forces broke into Belgium I visited in succession each colonial post of Imperial Germany on the shores of New Guinea and in the Bismarck Archi- pelago and here again the spirit of Genseric brooded over German expansion — an expansion much like the Vandal one — rapid, ruthless but of short duration. In Germany I had heard only favourable reports, indeed I might say, that the Fatherland was flooded with information, leading the world to believe that German Kultur had not only been accepted as a boon by the Papuans and Kanakas of the South Seas, but that English in-
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fluence was declining and manifest destiny pointed to the Kaiser as prospective guardian of the Pacific. What then was my surprise in discover- ing, by conversation with German officials on the spot and off their guard, that in a colonial occupa- tion covering a whole generation not only had the Prussian name become synonymous with cruelty and treachery, but that the experiment was an economic failure no less than a political one.
Before England handed over this rich domain to Prussian exploitation, British missionaries and traders were welcome throughout the islands and there was fair play for all who chose to seek their fortunes in this field. Papuan children came of their own accord to learn English of the missionaries, and as these ministers of the Gospel were supported generously by home soci- eties, they had no temptation to act otherwise than as benefactors, especially in the matter o| defending native interests in the press and even in the British Parliament when occasion arose. The relations of England with New Guinea had existed for more than a century in a peaceful
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haphazard way, which all recognized but no one needed to legally define. Then of a sudden with much rattling of war harness, in struts the Prus- sian, in a manner recalling the introduction of Genseric to Tangiers — and presto! all is changed. The Englishman is excluded from his customary trade-routes; British ships are boycotted even to the extent of compelling them to leave port without filling their water-tanks; native chiefs are put under military rules and forced to furnish slaves to German planters who exploit them after a fashion that would have been repugnant in the West Indies of a century ago, and which modern Germany disguised by the euphemistic appella- tion of contract labour. The Prussianizing of these hitherto English fields was in full swing; and as in Germany, so here, the pulpit and the elementary school were relied upon to produce in the next generation a population of Papuans who would have forgotten all their English and have learned to sing with patriotic gusto Deutsch- land, Deutschland uber Alles. So far as brute force was concerned, the Hohenzollern did about as well in German New Guinea as the Potsdam
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Vandals did in North Africa; but both found their severest stumbling-block in the field where Prussia is weakest, namely the field of the spiritual forces, which are sometimes called the imponderabilia or in academic jargon, psychology. William the Second did not feel the time ripe to expel every English-speaking missionary because it might have resulted in unpleasant retaliation, but he applied to them a boycott intended to serve the same purpose under the specious pretence that he was only enforcing domestic regulations with which no foreign power could find fault. The Pope of Rome had given the solid Catholic vote of his clerical faithful in the Fatherland in order to strengthen the Kaiser and his military budget against the attacks of radicals and socialists. Gratitude if not a formal contract demanded that in return for this the Prussian monarch should pay the Pope handsomely and therefore the ad- vent of the Prussian " assessor" in Friedrich- wilhelmshafen was quickly followed by gifts to Papal missions of land stolen from the natives.
But missions cannot live from land alone;
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and therefore the Kaiser's police in Papua were directed to scour the tropical jungle and compel the bushy-headed children to come and learn gothic type and gothic ideas in the schools nominally conducted by missionaries, but actually directed from Prussian police headquarters. In days when the missionary was an English or American, the natives were glad to come and learn. But when Prussian priests and policemen pushed their propaganda by means of the whipping-post and forced them to learn a language not merely hideous in itself but useless outside of Germany, much murmuring followed and protests which were treated as acts of rebellion. Punitive expe- ditions were organized, villages were shot to pieces or burned, and a few who were too old or feeble to escape were made prisoners and brought for sentence before a Prussian magistrate who knew nothing of native custom and cared less. The papers of the Fatherland resounded with triumphs of their troops against alleged savages; beautiful pictures were painted to show the blessings of Kultur at Friedrichwilhelmshafen, and every German mother who read the official
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bulletins praised the Kaiser for spreading religious light in those dark waters.
The story of Kiao-Chow and the Bismarck Archipelago is the story of East and West Africa and above all of Samoa. It is a story with blood on every page; the story of colonial ambition directed by soldiers and not by statesmen; the story of natives whose feelings are outraged and liberties extinguished ; the story of colonies devoid of colonists. Military power is needful — brute force has its uses, but these are only a very small part of colonial Empire.
England has had to organize police forces in all her crown colonies, and has also had her native wars, but these have been the exception. With Germany, native discontent has been the rule. And as a broad illustration of what I mean, let me point out that in the colonial world as a whole, not omitting India, the trend of emigration has never been away from the British flag, but, on the contrary, always towards her liberty-loving folds. And in India itself, emigration has been from the independent native states towards those under British military rule — which is answer
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enough to the oft-repeated Prussian prediction that in any future war all India would rise as one man and drive every Englishman into the sea. The Prussian of 1914 has been profoundly dis- appointed as was no doubt the Prussian- Vandal of 533 A.D., that British India not only remained loyal, in the Great War, but did her full share of service — and so did every other colony over which the Union Jack has waved.
When Gelimer fled to the Numidian Mountains, all North Africa rejoiced in his fall, as all German colonies rejoiced on learning that henceforward they would no longer be forced to learn that barbarous tongue or submit to the insolence of the Herr Assessor. The Germany of my time differs little from that of Genseric and Gelimer. I speak not of material differences such as are made by railways, factories, transatlantic restau- rants, and Wagner theatres. In things of mere matter, modern Germany has achieved first place and she has employed this material power to prepare a war in which she fondly expected to smash all such nations as had thought less of material power and more of things spiritual.
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Prussia in our day stands on a lower plane spirit- ually and intellectually than any of her neigh- bours. The triumphs of which she boasts are in the field of imitation and organization. Her Kultur compares with civilisation as a Berlin casino to an Atheneum Club of London, or a Century Club of New York; she is a magnificent department store as compared with the labora- tory of an Edison, or the generous alcoves of the British Museum. She is like a gaudy shop with glaring lights attracting the passers-by through much advertising of a noisy nature. I need only refer you to Prussian propaganda in the past thirty years; exchange professors; the visit of Prince Henry; sending to Washington the big bronze of Frederick of Prussia; societies for pro- moting the German language in American schools and colleges. All this has impressed the unthink- ing and those who think after and not before, reading the papers — that Germany is great be- cause she is much in print. The corollary of this is that countries cannot be great unless they are advertised as such — and this view is encouraged perhaps by a press largely controlled by Germans
First Prussian Kaiser 193
or by Jews, whose educational bias has been gained in Frankfort or Posen.
The modern Prussian is a worshipper of mate- rial success and military methods — and so was the Prussian in Genseric and Gelimer. We also worship success, but we worship higher things as well, and when this war shall have ended, we shall worship them even more. We shall do a little thinking independently of German direc- tion; we shall be less keen to have our university catalogues bristling with Leipzig and Gottingen Ph.D.'s; we shall seek assistance amongst those who advertise less and accomplish more. We shall enquire not so much the amount of a man's fortune as the means by which it has been ac- quired. We shall be less impressed by the vast volume of German scholarship as by the quality of her output and the tendency of her teaching.
We shall then learn what we might have suspected many years ago, that Germany has imitated the civilisation of others — never created one of her own — least of all one which has aroused the envy of any other country. Prussia is crowded with schools of architecture, painting,
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sculpture — but how much of this would be worth transporting from the banks of the Havel to those of the Thames or the Seine? German philosophy, poesy, drama, history, and fiction — these are portentous in volume but in quality how meagre! The educated German boasts noisily of his Goethe and Schiller; his Hegel and Schopenhauer; his Treitschke and Schiemann; but when alone he warms himself at the flame of Shakespeare and Moli£re; Bacon and Voltaire; Gibbon and Mon- tesquieu. And as the Vandals of Carthage soon forgot their Gothic in favour of Latin, so in our day, fashionable Germany dresses to resemble England and simulates a French accent in spite of police and Imperial warnings.
In the mechanics of musical composition the German has done much, but here again South Germany and not Prussia may claim the credit. Music has ever been the refuge of enslaved people because it is one of the few avenues of escape for the man forbidden to think. The police-ridden may not speak aloud of tyranny, but they may shout their griefs in an opera chorus or bellow to the God of Battles in a Liederkranz gathering.
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Music is no assistance to the reason or the higher perceptions — it plays upon passive chords — it ap- peals most effectually to negroes, slaves, serfs, and those who in general would be regarded as excellent material for the hypnotic expert. Music is at home in the lower Danube, where the Magyar and the Tsigane fiddle away their moral fibre and where emotional passion takes the place of civic virtue. It is no accident that the communities which have fought for civil and religious liberty, and which have shown conspicuous capacity in making and enforcing municipal law have pro- duced no Strausses or Richard Wagners. The Scotch Calvinists, the Puritan New Englanders, the Dutch Boers of South Africa, the reforming elements of England, the Swiss and Norwegians —these are communities where the truth is a living force and national needs understood, but where there are fewer operas than in Spain, Italy, Germany, or Russia.
Of course the songs of the people are the hymns of all time and are independent of opera houses or professional composers. They are like truth and the fables of AZsop — of all time and no time. They
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know no frontiers and no original author. The peasant has sung to his sweetheart and the mother to her babe from the first dawn of humanity; and when Wagner and his dreary demigods shall have been forgotten, the lullaby and the folksong will continue to cheer us at our labour, whether on the Ganges or the Nile, in the Australian bush or the mesas of Colorado. The German has com- plicated and composed in music as in philosophy, but we must look elsewhere for the author of Annie Laurie, Old Folks at Home, and My Country '/ is of Thee.
And now an end to Genseric and his short- lived but terrible colony! We have brought the last of his line, his grandson, Gelimer, as a captive and cringing suppliant to the feet of a Roman Emperor and his beautiful wife. The Vandal of Potsdam principles was not executed or even imprisoned — on the contrary he was allowed to close his life amid royal pleasures on a vast estate somewhere in Asia Minor, where in reincarnation he might today hear the whistle of the Bagdad- Berlin Express. Gelimer is known by name to very few for he ruled by force alone. The name
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of Justinian is recorded with gratitude by the world of science, because it is linked with an Empire which even in its declining years asserted the supremacy of general laws over personal caprice. And the philosopher who muses on the mutability of human affairs will remark that the Vandal king, born in the purple, bowed before a throne on which sat Justinian, reared as a peasant soldier, and Theodora who had danced on the boards of a public theatre. Yet the peasant soldier gave to the world our monumental pandects in the very year that saw German rule broken in Africa; and, as to the Empress, she became a saintly light in the Catholic Church, reigned twenty-two years by the side of a loving husband, and built many churches. But her crowning act of generosity was in treating her Prussian captive with gener- osity most un-Prussian.
CONCLUDING CHAPTER
Genseric, William II., and Frederick the Great
'"PHE future has few surprises for him who knows the past; and the appearance of a William II. should therefore have been anticipated by those who knew Genseric. Yet such is the capacity of man to believe what is most agreeable to his wishes that we may trace throughout his- tory a disposition to regard each war as the last, and every peace as the signal for universal dis- armament.
In the days of Frederick II. of Prussia, the philo- sophers of Europe corresponded with one another as members of an intellectual republic devoted to the enlightenment of mankind by studying the laws of nature and combating the rule of a clergy, sunk in superstition. Scholars of Ger- many, and France, and England knew no political
boundaries and looked upon the wars of that
198
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century as dynastic affairs which could not for a moment snap the spiritual bond that linked together a Voltaire and a David Hume; a Diderot and a Baron Grimm.
When the great historian of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire paused at the close of his immortal work — in which nearly every chap- ter dealt with the interminable struggle of Civili- sation against the German barbarian — he cast his prophetic eye over the frontiers of his then known world and congratulated Europe that the Hun and the Vandal had at last disappeared and that Genserics were no longer possible, because the land that bred them had now become that of Lessing and Wieland, Schiller and Goethe! Gib- bon was perhaps the wisest of men in an age not- able for learning and polite literature and he wrote shortly before a war that was destined to last more than twenty years; to involve every hamlet of Europe and to place upon an Imperial throne a conqueror whose father was notary in Corsica!
The wise men of Europe — even the Franklins of the New World — sounded no note of warning.
2oo Genseric
On the contrary, their letters are abundant evi- dence that towards the close of the eighteenth century the whole world of polite society agreed to regard war as not merely brutal, but unfashion- able; in short a relic of the Dark Ages, and consequently not worth serious consideration by such as looked forward to higher planes of human progress.
The age of Frederick is well known to us of to- day merely because the literature of the eighteenth century is readable and interesting. But the student of preceding centuries will be equally amazed to note analogous letters during each era of comparative quiet, whether in the days of Montaigne, Erasmus, Chaucer, Justinian, or Caesar Augustus.
Frederick II. was singularly like William II. and Genseric in that all three were famed for the craft with which they cultivated pacifism in every country but their own. Each in turn raided first, and declared war afterwards; each was a Vandal in blood, yet each masked himself in the insignia of civilised monarchy. Each of these monarchs had remarkable success for a short time. Gen-
First Prussian Kaiser 201
seric overran Northern Africa. Frederick II. fig- ured as the greatest soldier of Europe, after the Seven Years' War, yet men who fought under him at Torgau and Rossbach lived to see the whole of the Prussian army chased like hares from the fields of Auerstaedt and Jena. William II. preached pacifism until 1896 and is now in the fourth year of a world war which he has provoked by the same arts that characterized Genseric and Frederick. The rape of Belgium in 1914 may be compared with Frederick's unannounced seizure of Saxony in 1756, or Genseric's capture of Car- thage in 539. What are a few centuries in the life of man ! Why should we think that a Vandal or Hun has changed in a few thousand years? Because a Prussian dresses up to resemble a gentleman, or a scholar, must we therefore be blind to his real qualities, as he has revealed him- self to us when off his guard?
Let us gaze for a moment on the Prussian monument to the Great Frederick, which was reared in the days of his peace-loving successor, Frederick William IV. It is a monument of colos- sal proportions intended to symbolize the greatness
2O2 Genseric
of the Hohenzollern monarchy at the moment of its greatest power under a king who was not merely a great war lord, but who posed as the patron of science, art, and letters. The foreign visitor sees from afar the lofty figure of the Roi Philosophy — astride of his impatient charger; and he approaches in order to study the many personages grouped at the base. These, he doubts not, must be intended for the illustrious poets, painters, men of science of that philosophic age. But he is puzzled by seeing them all in military garb and is more puzzled still on learn- ing that these are all Prussian soldiers. Where then, he asks, are the great men of Germany? Why are none but warriors on a monument, dedicated to a nation's greatness — and our for- eigner is turning away in surprise and sorrow, when, on passing to the rear of the great King's horse, he notices one figure in civilian dress — a shrinking old man who seems uncomfortable in this post of questionable comfort — immediately under the horse's tail.
The foreign visitor clamours to know who this is — the one human oasis in a desert of Prussian
First Prussian Kaiser 203
militarism — and he finds that it is Emanuel Kant of Konigsberg, the grandson of a Scotch sadler.
And here you have in bronze, if not aere peren- nius, the secret of Prussian Kultur. The brazen boastfulness of a people who blush not to see their period of greatest glory symbolized by mere instruments of material destruction. It is this spirit of recrudescent Vandalism that has made Berlin a vast quarry of monumental mediocrity and her people a by-word for lack of taste.
You can tell the Prussian a long ways off — but you can't tell him much. You can tell the Prus- sian woman still farther off, for she wears more violent colours. It was so in the days of Genseric —it remains true under William II. The Vandal court has ever been the court of boisterous bore- dom— Berlin does all it can to attract the stranger, but few go at all and none remain long.
Give a Paris girl a few ribbons and feathers and a bit of wire — and watch her as these trifles grow in value under her dainty fingers, until she hands it out to you, or your wife, a hat for which you are glad to pay as to an artist. If you have the courage to make the same experiment in
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Berlin you will grow depressed as you watch the banana fingers of that Vandal Prussian maiden mutilating your feathers and ribbons, and finally offering you a hat that would make my cow go dry.
Here you have the reason why this war between the barbarian and the people on a higher plane must go on until one or the other is destroyed. The Prussian commenced his preparations to invade England and defy the United States in 1896, and I thought it my duty then as now to publish what I knew to be the case. But such warnings make unpopular literature. It is much more in accordance with modern taste to preach the Gospel according to Bryan and to assure the money-making mob that our country is invul- nerable and that in case of war, the Government has but to issue a call to arms and a million men will rally to the colours — all accoutred as for war — well-armed and abundantly equipped with artil- lery, aeroplanes, ammunition — to say nothing of submarines and transport ships.
I have tried to draw the parallel between the days of Roman pacifism under Genseric and American Bryanism under William II. Both
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Bryan and William II. are each a manifestation, deserving of microscopic research. They do not stand isolated ; for should the so-called boy orator of that shallow and broad-mouthed river Platte be ever silenced, there are many graduates of Lake Mohonk, eager to accept his burdens — and his fees. And so William II. is the creature of American Bryanism, as Genseric was a creature of a Roman pacifism that preached disarma- ment everywhere except in the world of German barbarism.
We shall have raids from the Baltic so long as the spirit of Genseric rules in those prolific regions. Italy and England and France will continue to create glorious works of art and the Vandal will continue to envy the men whose work they clum- sily seek to imitate. They cannot make Berlin attractive, but they can at least bombard Notre Dame and possibly depopulate Paris. The Prus- sian artists can please only Prussians, yet they may hope to wreck the Louvre and the Luxembourg, as Genseric sacked Rome and Attila levelled Aquileia to a dust heap. For half a century the commerce of Germany has been fabulously in-
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creased through British generosity. Every Eng- lish colony has been opened, not merely to German shipping, but to the unhampered activity of every commercial or political agent of the " Father- land." Generosity is blind and John Bull was once so fatuous as to believe that the Hohenzol- lern would be grateful for this hospitality.
On the contrary! The Vandal Kaiser, who could not imitate the virtues by which England had built up her vast Empire of self-governing states, taught his people that he could, at least, undermine and finally smash this costly fabric and possibly profit by such a calamity. So far he has lost every colony that ever flew the Pots- dam flag — and he has lost these territories, not merely because the Allies had better fighting material, but because the Prussian is hated by every native, as much so today as when the last Vandal King took refuge in the mountains of Lybia and shunned the hospitality of his own subjects more than the vengeance of a Roman conqueror.
Queen Victoria did a wrong to her own people and a greater one to her African and Oriental
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ones when she permitted Imperial Germany to fly her flag over a million square miles of tropical colony — some thirty years ago. But without that political blunder the world would have lost one of the noblest lessons of this war. Today we see Britannia revealed as the mother of self- governing colonies throughout the world; we see her flag a symbol of justice to the man of colour no less than to the white; we see her issuing triumphantly from a colonial crisis prepared by German intrigue and warmly seconded by the Vatican, and the dullest may now at last see for himself that if England has not merely found assistance in her own colonies but has recon- quered those she once weakly surrendered to Germany, it is because the rule of William II. is today no more humane in the colonial world than it was fifteen centuries ago under his Vandal avatar, Genseric.
THE END
Prussian Memories
By Poultney Bigelow
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Mr. Poultney Bigelow passed some years of his boyhood in Prussia, and in later years he made various sojourns in Germany. At the time of his school experience, his father, the late John Bigelow, was Minister in Paris. The father had friends among the Court officials in Berlin, and young Bigelow had the opportunity, during his school work, of associating as a play- mate with the present Emperor William. His boyish impressions were corrected or confirmed through the knowledge secured in his later visits to Prussia. He writes with full knowledge and with freedom from prejudice. He has hi fact an affectionate memory of his playfellow William, and speaks with appreciation of other noteworthy characters with whom he came into relations. In summing up, however, the char- acter, the aims, and the policies of Prussia, he arrives at the conclusion that the success of Prussia in its attempt to dominate Europe and to create a world empire would bring serious trouble upon Germany, upon Europe, and upon the world. Mr. Bigelow has a keen sense of humor and his narrative is dramatic, spirited, and thoroughly readable.
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" In the future, as in the past, the German people will have to seek firm cohesion in its glorious army and in its belaurelled young fleet."
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14 The spirit of German militarism, which has enabled us to stand the test of the World War, we must preserve in future, because, with it, our position stands or falls."
" Germany must for all time to come main- tain her claim to world power."
" Lord Kitchener was prompt in grasping the situation, and by raising a strong army put the country in a position to sustain a long war."
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Genseric, king of the Vandals and first Prussian kaiser