Excerpt from Our Settlement With Germany

The leadership' in the building of modern Germany fell, accord ingly, not to the middle liberal stratum in its population, but to the class which history had endowed with all these advantages the Junkers, under the brilliant guidance of Bismarck. He had the sagacity to arrange a marriage of interests between the old landed ruling class of Prussia and the strongest and - in the tech knical sense - most progressive section of the young capitalist class, the industrialists. It was a marriage of rye with steel. There resulted a singular combination, without parallel elsewhere, oi. The modern and scientific outlook of big business with the tradi tions of 'an aristocracy which specialised inthe military art and in large scale agriculture. Both understood organisation, but neither of them possessed the Western liberal outlook. The Junker class, which staffed the courts and the civil service as well as the army, had its virtues - its belief in law, its respect for duty and its freedom from venality'. But it carried on into modern times some of the habits of thought and some of the values of feudalism. It played the autocrat on its great estates, Whose workers werestill serfs when the nineteenth century opened. It defended its ancient privileges; separated itself from the less fortunate classes with an offensive arrogance, and kept alive vestiges of barbar ism, like'the duel, which conditioned it for war. Both of these classes used the State in many ways, of Which tariffs were the most conspicuous, to serve their own economic interests and to gether they made a common front against the organised workers.

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