Friedrich Engels

Prussian Schnapps in the German Reichstag

Prussian Schnapps in the German Reichstag.

I.

On 4 February, Herr von Kardorff interpellated the Reich government concerning the high taxation of German “spirits” in England and Italy. He drew the gentlemen’s attention to the fact that (report of the _Kölnische Zeitung_) “in our eastern and northern provinces, wide stretches of country, hundreds of square miles of fairly infertile, sterile soil, have attained a relatively high yield and cultivation through a very extensive potato cultivation, and that this potato cultivation in turn is based on the fact that over these lands there are scattered numerous distilleries, in which spirit manufacture is carried on as an agricultural bye-industry. Whereas formerly in those regions about 1,000 people lived to the square mile, the land now, as a result of spirit manufacture, supports about 3,000 people per square mile, for the distilleries are a necessary market for potatoes, because they are difficult to transport on account of their bulk and cannot be transported at all in winter owing to the frost. Secondly, the distilleries convert the potato into the valuable and easily transportable alcohol, and finally make the soil more fertile through numerous feed residues. How considerable the interests at stake are, anyone can realise who considers that we extract about 36 million marks from the duty on spirits for our state revenue, despite the fact that Germany has the lowest spirit duty of all the countries of the world, for example, five times lower than Russia.”

The Prussian Junkers must have become very swollen-headed of late, to have the courage to draw the eyes of the world to their “spirit industry,” vulgo schnapps-distilling.

In the previous century, very little spirit was distilled in Germany, and that only from grain. It is true that people did not know how to separate out the fusel oil also contained in this spirit (we shall return to this point), because they were not yet even acquainted with this fusel oil itself; but experience taught that the quality of the spirit improved considerably through longer storage, that the burning taste disappeared, and that its consumption was less intoxicating and less injurious to health. The petty-bourgeois conditions under which distilling was then carried on, and the still undeveloped demand that looked more to quality than quantity, permitted the product almost everywhere to be kept for years in the cellar, and thus, by gradual chemical transformation of the more harmful constituents, to give it a less pernicious character. Thus we find at the end of the previous century a more extensive distilling mostly confined to a few urban places, Münster, Ulrichstein, Nordhausen, and others, and their product usually graced with the epithet “old.”

Towards the beginning of this century, the distilleries multiplied in the countryside, as a bye-industry of the larger landed proprietors and tenant farmers, especially in Hanover and Brunswick. They found buyers, on the one hand through the ever-spreading consumption of spirits, on the other through the needs of the constantly growing and constantly warring armies, which in turn carried the taste for spirits into ever-widening circles. Thus, after the Peace of 1814, distilling could expand further and further, and in the described manner, quite different from the old urban distilleries, as a bye-industry of large estate managers, gained a firm footing on the Lower Rhine, in Prussian Saxony, Brandenburg, and Lusatia.

The turning point for distilling, however, was the discovery that spirit could be profitably produced not only from grain, but also from potatoes. With this the whole trade was revolutionised. On the one hand, the centre of gravity of distilling was thereby finally transferred from the towns to the country, and the petty-bourgeois producers of good old beverage were more and more superseded by the great landowners producing infamous potato fusel. On the other hand, and this is historically far more important, the grain-distilling great landowner was superseded by the potato-distilling great landowner; distilling moved more and more from the fertile grain lands to the infertile potato lands, i.e. from north-west Germany to north-east Germany — to Old Prussia east of the Elbe.

This turning point occurred with the bad harvest and famine of 1816. Despite the better harvests of the two following years, as a result of the continued export of grain to England and other countries, grain prices remained so high that it became almost impossible to use grain for distilling. The hogshead of schnapps, which in 1813 was worth only 39 thalers, was sold in 1817 at 70 thalers. Then the potato took the place of grain, and by 1823 the hogshead was already to be had for 14 to 17 thalers!

But how did the poor East Elbian Junkers, allegedly totally ruined by the war and the sacrifices they had made for the fatherland, obtain the means by which they transformed their oppressive mortgage debts into profitable schnapps distilleries? The favourable conjuncture of the years 1816-19 certainly yielded them very advantageous returns and increased their credit through the generally rising land prices; but that was nowhere near sufficient. Our patriotic Junkers, however, received in addition: firstly, state aid in various direct and indirect forms, and secondly, there was a circumstance that we must examine particularly. As is well known, in Prussia in 1811 the commutation of peasant forced labour services, and in general the settlement between peasants and landlords, had been legally regulated in such a way that deliveries in kind were converted into money payments, these were capitalised, and could be redeemed either in cash in definite instalments, or by the surrender of a piece of peasant land to the landlord, or partly in money, partly in land. This law remained a dead letter until the high grain prices of 1816-19 enabled the peasants to proceed with the commutation. From 1819 on, the commutations made rapid progress in Brandenburg, more slowly in Pomerania, still more slowly in Posen and Prussia. The money thus taken from the peasants, legally but unlawfully (for the forced labour burdens had been unlawfully imposed on them), in so far as it was not immediately squandered in the old aristocratic manner, served mainly for the establishment of distilleries. In the three other provinces mentioned, too, distilling spread to the same degree as the peasant commutations supplied the means for it. The schnapps industry of the Prussian Junkers is thus literally founded with the money taken from the peasants. And it made rapid headway, especially from 1825. Barely two years later, in 1827, 125 million quarts of schnapps were distilled in Prussia, i.e. 10½ quarts for every head of the population, to a total value of 15 million thalers; Hanover, on the other hand, fifteen years previously the premier schnapps state of Germany, produced only 18 million quarts.

It will be understood that the whole of Germany, in so far as the individual states or customs unions of individual states did not dam it up by customs barriers, was now flooded by a veritable storm flood of Prussian potato fusel. Fourteen thalers the ahm of 180 quarts, i.e. the quart at 2 groschen 4 pfennigs wholesale! Drunkenness, which formerly had cost three or four times as much, was now made accessible daily even to the most indigent, since for fifteen silver groschen a man could stay in a state of highest intoxication the whole week long.

The effect of these unprecedentedly cheap spirit prices, making themselves felt at different times in different places but always almost sudden, was unheard of. I still remember very well how, at the end of the 1820s, the cheapness of schnapps suddenly broke over the Lower Rhine-Mark industrial district. Especially in the Bergisches Land, and quite particularly in Elberfeld-Barmen, the mass of the working population fell victim to drink. In droves, arm in arm, taking up the whole breadth of the street, from 9 o’clock in the evening onwards the “drunken men” staggered, amid discordant yelling, from public house to public house and finally home. Considering the state of education of the workers at that time, and the complete hopelessness of their situation, this was no wonder. Least of all in the blessed Wupper valley, where for sixty years one industry has been replacing another, so that one part of the workers is continually depressed, if not breadless, while another (at that time the dyers) was well paid for that period. And when, as then, the Wupper valley workers were left with no other choice than between the earthly schnapps of the pot-houses and the heavenly schnapps of the pietistic parsons — what wonder that they preferred the former, however bad it was.

And it was very bad. As it came from the cooling apparatus, without further purification, with all its fusel oil content, it was dispatched and drunk fresh. All spirits distilled from wine lees, mangel-wurzels, grain or potatoes contain this fusel oil, a mixture of higher alcohols, i.e. liquids analogous in composition to ordinary alcohol but containing more carbon and hydrogen (among others primary propyl alcohol, isobutyl alcohol, but by far predominantly amyl alcohol). All these alcohols are more harmful than ordinary spirit (ethyl alcohol), and the dose in which they act as a poison is much smaller than for the latter. Professor Binz in Bonn has recently proved by numerous experiments that the intoxicating effects of our spirituous drinks, as much as their unpleasant after-effects in the highly laudable hangover, or in more serious symptoms of illness and poisoning, are attributable far less to the ordinary spirit or ethyl alcohol than to the higher alcohols, i.e. to the fusel oil. Not only do they act more intoxicatingly and more destructively, they also determine the character of the intoxication. Everyone knows

from personal observation, where not experience, how different wine intoxication (indeed the intoxications of the different wine varieties), beer intoxication, schnapps intoxication are in their effect on the brain. The more fusel oil in the drink, and the more unhealthy this fusel oil in its composition, the more riotous and savage the intoxication becomes. But it is well known that young, unpurified potato schnapps contains, of all distilled drinks, the most fusel oil, and that of the most unfavourable composition. The effect of unusually large quantities of this drink on such an excitable, passionate population as that of the Bergisches Land was, accordingly, entirely in keeping with this. The character of the intoxication had totally altered. Every merry-making that formerly ended in genial hilarity and only rarely in excesses—in which latter, to be sure, the Kneif (the knife, Engl. knife) not infrequently played a role—every such merry-making now degenerated into a riotous carouse, and ended in inevitable brawling, in which knife wounds were never absent and fatal stabbings became ever more frequent. The priests put this down to increasing godlessness, the lawyers and other philistines to the tavern balls. The true cause was the sudden flooding with Prussian fusel oil, which simply exerted its normal physiological effect and delivered hundreds of poor devils into fortress-building imprisonment.

This acute effect of the cheap schnapps lasted for years, until it gradually more or less disappeared. But the effect on morals did not vanish entirely; brandy remained a vital necessity for the working class to a greater degree than before, and its quality, although it improved somewhat, remained far below that of the old corn brandy of former times.

And as in the Bergisches Land, so it went elsewhere. At no time were the lamentations of philistinism over the increase in excessive brandy drinking among the workers more general, more unanimous, and louder than from 1825 to 1835. It is even questionable whether the dullness with which, in particular, the North German workers let the events of 1830 pass over them, without being affected by them, is not largely thanks to the schnapps that then ruled them more than ever. Serious, and especially successful, uprisings occurred only in wine-producing lands or in those German states which had more or less protected themselves against Prussian schnapps by tariffs. It would not be the only time that schnapps had saved the Prussian state.

The only industry that has produced still more devastating direct effects—and this not against its own people, but against foreigners—is the English-Indian opium industry for the poisoning of China.

Meanwhile, schnapps manufacture merrily continued on its course, spread more and more to the east, and brought one morgen after another of the north-east German sandy and swampy waste under the potato. Not content with blessing the fatherland, it strove to make the blessings of old Prussian fusel oil accessible to foreign countries. They redistilled the ordinary schnapps to remove a portion of the water it contained, and called the resulting hydrous and impure alcohol “Sprit”, which is the translation of spiritus into Prussian. The higher alcohols all have higher boiling points than ethyl alcohol. While this boils at 78½° on the centigrade thermometer, the boiling point of primary propyl alcohol is 97°, that of isobutyl alcohol 109°, that of amyl alcohol 132°. One might now think that, with careful distillation, at least the greater part of the latter, the main constituent of fusel oil, as well as a part of the isobutyl alcohol, would remain behind, and that at most a part of this would distil over together with the most of the primary propyl alcohol, which, however, is only very weakly represented in fusel oil. But even scientific chemistry renounces the separation by distillation of the three lower alcohols in question here, and can isolate amyl alcohol from fusel oil only by fractional distillation, which is inapplicable in distilling. At the same time, distillations in rural schnapps factories are rough enough; so it is no wonder if the Sprit exported at the beginning of the forties was still heavily mixed with fusel oil, as could easily be recognised by its smell; pure or only hydrous alcohol is almost odourless.

This Sprit went primarily to Hamburg. What happened with it? A portion was shipped to countries where import duties did not bar its way—Stettin also took part in this export; but the main bulk was used in Hamburg and Bremen for the adulteration of rum. This schnapps, distilled in the West Indies partly from the sugar cane itself, but for the most part from the waste of the cane left over from sugar manufacture, was the only one that, owing to its cheap production costs, could still compete with potato schnapps as a kind of luxury drink of the masses. To produce a “fine” but nevertheless cheap rum, for example, one took one cask of really fine Jamaica rum, three to four casks of cheap bad Berbice rum, and two to three casks of Prussian potato Sprit—and this or a similar mixture shaken together yielded the desired thing. This “poison”, as merchants involved in the adulteration themselves called it in my presence, was shipped to Denmark, Sweden, Norway and Russia, but a very considerable portion also went back up the Elbe or via Stettin to the lands from which the noble Sprit had come, and there was partly drunk as rum, partly smuggled into Austria and Poland.

The Hamburg merchants did not stop at rum adulteration. With the genius peculiar to them, they were the first to see what world-shaking future role was reserved for Prussian potato schnapps. They had already tried their hand at all kinds of other beverages, and as early as the end of the thirties nobody in North Germany outside Prussia who knew anything about wine would order white French wines from Hamburg, as it was generally said that these were sweetened there with sugar of lead, and thereby poisoned at the same time. However that may be, potato spirit soon became the basis of an ever-growing adulteration of beverages. Rum was followed by cognac, which already required more art in its treatment. Soon they began to treat wine with Sprit, and finally they arrived at the point of preparing port wine and Spanish wines entirely without wine, from Sprit, water, and vegetable juices, which were repeatedly replaced by chemicals. The business flourished all the more because in many countries such practices were either directly forbidden, or at least came so close to the penal code that it was not yet considered advisable to venture upon them. But Hamburg was the seat of unrestricted free trade, and so people adulterated briskly and thoroughly, “to Hamburg’s well-being”.

However, the monopoly of adulteration did not last long. After the revolution of 1848, when in France the exclusive rule of high finance and a few outstanding big industrialists had been replaced by the momentary rule of the entire bourgeoisie, the French producers and traders began to perceive what miraculous powers slumbered in such a cask of Prussian potato spirit. They began to adulterate their cognac already at home, instead of sending it unadulterated abroad, and even more to improve the cognac intended for domestic consumption (I thus name, for brevity’s sake, all schnapps distilled from wine lees) by a vigorous addition of Prussian potato spirit. Through this, cognac—the only schnapps that enters into mass consumption in France—became considerably cheaper. The Second Empire naturally favoured these manoeuvres in the interest of the suffering masses, and so we find, upon the fall of the Napoleonic dynasty, that thanks to the gracious effects of old Prussian schnapps, drunkenness, formerly almost unknown there, had attained a considerable extension in France.

An unheard-of series of bad wine harvests and, finally, the commercial treaty of 1861, which opened England to the French wine trade, gave the occasion for a new advance. The weak wines of poor years, whose acidity could not be eliminated by adding sugar, required an addition of alcohol in order to become stable. They were therefore mixed with Prussian Sprit. Further, the English taste was accustomed to strong wines—the natural French local wines, which now came in masses for export, were too thin and too cold for the English. What in the world could be found better to make them strong and warm than Prussian Sprit? Bordeaux became more and more the chief place for the adulteration of French, Spanish, and Italian wines, which there were transformed into “fine Bordeaux”, and—for the utilisation of Prussian Sprit.

Yes indeed, Spanish and Italian wines. Since the consumption of French red wines—and no bourgeois wants to drink any other—has so enormously increased in England, North and South America, and the colonies, even the almost inexhaustible wealth of wines of France no longer suffices. Almost the entire usable wine harvest of northern Spain, among others the whole harvest of the wine-rich Rioja in the Ebro valley, goes to Bordeaux. Thither Genoa, Leghorn, Naples send whole shiploads of wine. While these wines, with the help of Prussian Sprit, are made capable of withstanding the sea transport, this wine export raises the wine prices in Spain and Italy to such an extent that wine becomes quite unaffordable for the mass of the labouring population, who formerly drank it daily. Instead, they drink schnapps, and the main constituent of this schnapps is again—Prussian potato spirit. Indeed, Herr v. Kardorff complains in the Reichstag that in Italy this is not yet the case to a sufficient degree.

Wherever we turn, we find Prussian Sprit everywhere. The Prussian Sprit reaches incomparably further than the arm of the German Reich government. And wherever we find this Sprit, it serves above all—adulteration. It becomes the means whereby southern European wines are made shippable and thus withdrawn from the domestic labouring population. And as the lance of Achilles heals the wounds it has inflicted, so the Prussian Sprit simultaneously offers the working classes, robbed of wine, a substitute in adulterated brandy! Potato spirit is for Prussia what iron and cotton goods are for England, the article that represents it on the world market. So it is no wonder that the latest adept and at the same time regenerator of socialism, Herr Eugen Dühring, celebrates distilling “in the first instance … as a natural connection (of industry) to agricultural activities” and triumphantly exclaims: “The production of spirit is of such importance that it will be underestimated rather than overestimated!”—But indeed, the Anch’io son pittore (I too am a painter, as Correggio said) means in Prussian: “I too am a schnapps distiller.”

With this, however, the miraculous deeds of the Prussian potato schnapps are far from exhausted. “Whereas formerly,” says Herr v. Kardorff, “in those regions about 1,000 people dwelt on the square mile, the land now, in consequence of spirit manufacture, supports about 3,000 people per square mile.” And this is on the whole correct. I do not know from what period Herr v. Kardorff speaks when he estimates the population at 1,000 head per square mile. Such a time certainly once existed. But if we exclude the provinces of Saxony and Silesia, where distilling plays a less prominent role alongside the other industries, and further, Posen, the greater part of which still shows no inclination, despite all the government’s efforts, to be anything other than Polish, we are left with the three provinces of Brandenburg, Pomerania, and Prussia. These three provinces have a combined area of 2,415 square miles. They had a total population in 1817 of 3,479,825 head, or 1,441 to the square mile; in 1871, of 7,432,407 head, or 3,078 to the square mile. We entirely agree with Herr v. Kardorff when he regards this increase in population as essentially a direct or indirect consequence of schnapps distilling. If we add to this the Altmark, northern, crop-growing Lower Silesia, and the predominantly German part of Posen, where the population conditions will have developed similarly, we have the actual schnapps area, but at the same time also the core of the Prussian monarchy. And here a quite different perspective opens up. Distilling now presents itself as the actual material basis of present-day Prussia. Without it the Prussian Junkerdom would have perished; its estates would have been bought up partly by great landed magnates, who would have formed a numerically small aristocracy in the English sense; partly they would have been broken up and would have formed the foundation of an independent peasantry. Without it the core of Prussia would have remained a land of about 2,000 head to the square mile, incapable of playing any further role in history, either for good or for ill, until the bourgeois industry had developed sufficiently to assume the social and perhaps political leadership here as well. Distilling has given development another turn. On a soil which produces almost nothing but potatoes and cabbage-Junkers, but these in massive quantities, it could defy the competition of a world. Favoured more and more by demand—from circumstances already explained—it could raise itself to become the central schnapps factory of the world. Under the existing social conditions this meant nothing other than the formation, on the one hand, of a class of medium-sized landowners, whose younger sons supplied the main material for the officers of the army and for the bureaucracy, i.e., a new lease of life for Junkerdom; and, on the other hand, of a relatively rapidly multiplying class of semi-serfs, from which the mass of the “crack regiments” of the army is recruited. As for the situation of this labouring mass, nominally free but made practically completely dependent on the estate owner through annual contracts, payment in kind, housing conditions, and finally through the manorial police, which under the new district ordinance has merely assumed a changed form, information can be obtained from the writings of Professor v. d. Goltz. In short, if Prussia was enabled to digest tolerably well the fragments west of the Elbe swallowed in 1815, to crush the revolution in Berlin in 1848, to take the lead of the German reaction in 1849 despite the Rhenish-Westphalian risings, to carry through the war with Austria in 1866, and in 1871 to bring the whole of Little Germany under the leadership of this most backward, most stable, least educated, still semi-feudal part of Germany—to whom does it owe this? To schnapps distilling.

II

Let us return, however, to the Reichstag. The debate was mainly participated in by Herr von Kardorff, Herr v. Delbrück, and the Hamburg Federal Plenipotentiary Krüger. From this debate it almost seems as if we are doing a crying injustice to Prussian potato spirit. It is not Prussian, but Russian spirit that is the evil. Herr v. Kardorff complains that Hamburg industrialists process Russian schnapps (and this is, as Herr Krüger expressly emphasises, distilled from grain, not from potatoes) into spirit, “send it out as German spirit and thereby damage the reputation of German spirit.” Herr Delbrück “has been told that such a substitution would meet with great difficulties, since so far it has not yet been possible to produce odourless spirit from Russian brandy as from German,” but he added cautiously: “Gentlemen, of course I cannot know that.”

So it is not Prussian potato spirit, but Russian grain spirit that is the evil. Prussian potato spirit is “odourless,” i.e., free of fusel oil; Russian grain spirit cannot yet be produced odourless, thus contains fusel oil, and when it is sold as Prussian, it deprives the latter of its fusel-free reputation. According to this we should indeed have wickedly slandered the Prussian “fusel-free one,” with absolutely anti-Reich intent. Let us see how things stand in reality.

There is indeed a process for de-fuselling brandy, by treating it with freshly blasted charcoal. As a result, the spirit coming on to the market has generally been less mixed with fusel oil of late. Now, however, there is the following difference between the two sorts of spirit which concern us here: grain spirit can be completely de-fuselled without great difficulty, whereas de-fuselling potato spirit is much more difficult and in large-scale production practically so nearly impossible, that even the purest spirit produced from potato schnapps always leaves a fusel smell when rubbed on the hand. It is therefore the rule that for use in pharmacies and for fine liqueurs only grain spirit is taken, or at least should be taken, never potato spirit (for even here, adulteration is practised!).

And a few days after the *Kölnische Zeitung* published the above schnapps debate, it carries (8 Feb., first edition) in its Miscellaneous News the following sigh of a Rhenish wine tippler: “It would be highly desirable now also to demonstrate the addition of potato spirit to thin wine. A dull heaviness of the head afterwards points to it, though too late, it is true. Potato spirit still contains fusel oil, whose otherwise unpleasant smell is masked by the peculiar one of the wine. This adulteration is among the most frequent.”

Finally, to reassure the old Prussian schnapps distillers, Herr Krüger brings to light the awkward fact that Russian grain spirit is paid for on the Hamburg market four marks dearer than Prussian potato spirit. The latter was quoted on 7 February in Hamburg at 35 marks per 100 litres; the Russian thus fetches a price 12 per cent better than the Prussian, whose reputation it is supposedly damaging!

And now, after all these facts, consider the injured-innocence face of the slandered, “odourless,” jealous-of-its-reputation, virtuous Prussian “fusel-free one,” which in wholesale trade costs only 35 marks a litre, cheaper than beer! If one puts that debate and these facts together, does one not feel tempted to ask: Who is being made a fool of here?

Universally embracing is the blessed influence of Prussian fusel oil, for with potato spirit it flows into every drink. From the sour thin Moselle and Rhine wine of poor localities, which is magically transformed into Brauneberger and Niersteiner with potato sugar and potato spirit, from the bad red wine which since Gladstone’s commercial treaty has flooded England and is there called “Gladstone,” right up to Château Lafitte and champagne, port and madeira drunk by the bourgeois in India, China, Australia, and America, there is no drink in whose composition Prussian fusel oil does not enter. The production of these drinks flourishes everywhere where wine grows and where wine is stored in large masses, and it jubilantly sings dithyrambs to potato spirit. But the consumption? Yes, the consumption becomes aware of it, by means of the “dull heaviness of the head,” in what the blessings of Prussian fusel oil consist, and tries to keep these blessings at arm’s length. In Italy, says Herr von Kardorff, the commercial treaty is applied in such a way that Prussian spirit pays far too high a duty. Belgium, America, England make the export of spirit thither impossible by high duties. In France, customs officials stick red labels on the spirit barrels to mark them as Prussian—truly the first time that French customs officials have done anything of public utility! In short, it has gone so far that Herr von Kardorff exclaims in despair: “Gentlemen, if you consider the situation of the German spirit industry, you will find that all countries are most anxiously closing themselves to our spirits!” Naturally enough! The gracious effects of these spirits have gradually become world-famous, and the only way to keep the “dull heaviness of the head” at bay is not to let the fusel stuff into the country at all.

And now, to make matters worse, a storm cloud, heavy and musty, is rising from the east over the hard-pressed schnapps Junkers. The big brother in Russia, the last refuge and shield of all time-honoured institutions against modern destructive fury, is now also starting to distil and export schnapps, and grain schnapps at that, and what is more, he supplies it just as cheaply as the Prussian Junkers their potato schnapps. Year by year the production and export of this Russian schnapps increases, and if until now it was rectified into spirit in Hamburg, Herr Delbrück tells us that “in the Russian ports ... a number of establishments for rectifying Russian brandy, equipped with the most excellent apparatus, are already in course of construction,” and he prepares the Junker gentlemen for the fact that Russian competition will grow over their heads more and more each year. Herr von Kardorff feels this very keenly and demands that the government shall simply prohibit the transit of Russian spirit through Germany.

Herr von Kardorff, as a Free Conservative deputy, ought really to be in a position better to appreciate the attitude of the German Reich government towards Russia. After the annexation of Alsace-Lorraine and the unheard-of war indemnity of the five milliards, by which France had been made the necessary ally of every enemy of Germany, and with the policy of striving to be everywhere respected or rather feared, but nowhere loved, one had to rely all the more firmly on the Holy Alliance with Russia, present and future, and to be doubly careful to cause no ill-will in St. Petersburg. And now Herr v. Kardorff wants the German government to throw this cobble-stone at the Tsar’s windows! Bismarck will be sure not to do you that favour.

To avoid being loved anywhere, there remained only one choice: either now to strike down Russia quickly as well, or else—to secure the Russian alliance (insofar as one can rely on Russia) by becoming the obedient servant of Russian diplomacy. As the first alternative could not be resolved upon, there was no escape from the second. Prussia, and with it the Reich, is once again in the same dependence on Russia as after 1815 and after 1850; and, just as after 1815, the “Holy Alliance” serves as a cloak for this dependence. The result of all the glorious victories is that, as before, one remains the fifth wheel on the European wagon. And Bismarck is surprised that the German public continues to concern itself with the affairs of foreign countries, where the real centres of decision actually lie, instead of with the deeds of the imperial government, which in Europe, and the speeches of the Reichstag, which in Germany have nothing to say! Prohibit the transit of Russian spirit! I should like to see the Imperial Chancellor who would dare that without having the declaration of war against Russia in his pocket at the same time! And when Herr von Kardorff makes such a strange demand of the imperial government, one is almost forced to believe that not only drinking brandy, but distilling brandy as well, befuddles the intellect. After all, even more famous brandy distillers than Herr von Kardorff have lately undertaken things for which, from their own standpoint, absolutely no rational explanation can be found.

For the rest, nothing is more understandable than that Russian competition strikes our brandy Junkers with uncanny dread. In the interior of Russia there are vast tracts of land where corn can be had just as cheap as potatoes in Prussia. In addition, fuel is mostly cheaper in Russia than in our distilling districts. All the material preconditions are present. What wonder, then, that a section of the Russian nobility, exactly like the Prussian Junkers, invests in distilleries the money advanced by the state on the peasants’ account upon the commutation of feudal labour services? That these distilleries, given the constantly growing market and the preference that corn brandy, at an equal or slightly higher price, will always enjoy over potato brandy, are rapidly expanding, and that already the time can be foreseen when their product will completely drive Prussian potato spirit from the market? Here no lamentations and no wailing avail. The laws of capitalist production, as long as it lasts, are as inexorable for Junkers as they are for Jews. Thanks to Russian competition, the day is approaching when the holy Ilium will sink, when the glorious Prussian brandy industry will vanish from the world market and at most still befuddle the home market. But on the day when the still-helm is wrested from the Prussian Junkers and only the coat-of-arms helm remains to them, or at most the army helm—on that day it is all up with Prussia. Let us disregard entirely the further course of world history, the possibility, probability, or inevitability of new wars or upheavals—Russian brandy competition alone must ruin Prussia, by destroying the industry that maintains the agriculture of the eastern provinces at its present stage of development. In so doing, however, it also destroys the conditions of existence of the East-Elbian Junkers and their 3,000 serfs to the square mile; and with that it destroys the basis of the Prussian state: the material of the officers as of the non-commissioned officers and the soldiers who unconditionally obey orders, together with the material of the core of the bureaucracy, the material that stamps contemporary Prussia with its specific character. With the collapse of brandy distilling, Prussian militarism collapses, and without it Prussia is nothing. Then these eastern provinces will sink back to the rank that befits them in Germany on account of their thin population, their industry kept in bondage to agriculture, their semi-feudal conditions, their lack of bourgeois development and general education. Then the remaining countries of the German Reich, freed from the pressure of this semi-medieval rule, will breathe again and assume the position due to them according to their industrial development and more advanced education. The eastern provinces themselves will seek out other industries, less dependent on agriculture and less amenable to feudal management, and in the meantime will lead their army to Social-Democracy instead of to the Prussian state. The whole rest of the world will exult that the Prussian fusel-oil poisoning is at last over and done with; the Prussian Junkers, however, and the Prussian state, finally “absorbed into Germany,” will have to console themselves with the words of the poet:

What shall live immortal in song
Must in life perish.