GERMANY ECLIPSED

Evening Post, Volume XC, Issue 92, 16 October 1915, Page 14

GERMANY ECLIPSED

"THEOCRATIC BUREAUCRACY." Germany is pre-eminently a bureaucracy. Her excellent organisation represents the good results of that bureaucracy. The bad results are found in the suppression of personal freedom of thought and action, and the prostitution of individual judgment to the requirements of the machine. Individual liberty has been subordinated to collective power; that is why the German obeys sumptuary laws that an AngloSaxon would defy. The bureaucratic machine works because of the complet-e subjection of its parts. Its machine output is excellent, but it warps the souls of its units that are yoked to its wheels. Is Japan an equally dangerous bureaucracy ?, In one respect it may be more so. Mr. A. M. Pooley defines it as a theocratic bureaucracy. The Kaiser has dona his best to rope in the Deity, but Germany is not theocratic in the way that Japan is. The theocratic impulse is not so uniform nor bo intense as in Japan. As editor of Count Hayashi's Memoirs, Mr. Pooley writes :—: — "Japan is distinctly a country to be treated with cautious courtesy, and a country about which our statesmen require to know a great deal more than they do know. A theocratic bureaucracy is probably the most effective government conceivable. Obedience is it« watchword. In Japan the world has the most highly organised bureaucratic machine m existence. As ex-President Roosevelt would put it, ' They have Germany beat to a frazzle.' " In these days, when so much is heard of Anglo-Saxon unwillingness to accept conscription, the above picture of obedience compels reflection. No decision in Europe can permanently decide the issue between East and West.