Prussian Schnapps in the German Reichstag

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Prussian Schnapps in the German Reichstag was written by Engels in February 1876. Its publication in Der Volksstaat and as a separate impression provoked irritation on the part of the authorities. As Engels wrote to Karl Kautsky on May 23, 1884, "'Prussian Schnapps' was a personal insult to Bismarck" (see present edition, Vol. 47).

I

On February 4, Mr. von Kardorff questioned the Imperial government about the high taxes imposed on German “Sprit” in England and Italy. He drew the attention of the honourable gentlemen to the fact that (as reported by the Kölnische Zeitung)

“in our eastern and northern provinces vast stretches of somewhat infertile, sterile land, covering hundreds of square miles, have, as a result of potato cultivation on a very large scale, successfully developed into arable land with a relatively high crop yield, and that the reason for growing potatoes here lies in turn in the fact that scattered throughout these regions are numerous distilleries where Sprit is manufactured as an agricultural side-line. Whereas in earlier times there used to be roughly 1,000 people to the square mile living in these parts, the land is now able to support roughly 3,000 people per square mile as a result of Sprit manufacture, because the distilleries provide an essential market for the potatoes which, on account of their bulk, are difficult to transport and cannot be transported at all in winter due to the frost. Secondly, the distilleries convert the potatoes into valuable and easily transportable alcohol, and, ultimately, make the land more fertile thanks to the numerous residues which can be used for fodder. Just how important the interests in question are, will be clear to anyone who considers that the taxation on spirits provides us with some 36 million marks of state revenue, despite the fact that Germany levies the lowest tax on spirits in the world, one fifth of that imposed in Russia, for example”.

The Prussian Junkers must really have been getting above themselves recently, daring, as they have, to draw the attention of the world to their “Sprit industry”, commonly known as schnapps distilling.

In the last century only small quantities of schnapps were distilled in Germany, and from grain only. Although they did not know how to remove the fusel oil which the schnapps also contained (we shall be returning to this point later), as they were still completely ignorant of the fusel oil’s existence; they did know from experience that the quality of the schnapps improved considerably after it was stored for some time, that it lost its burning taste, and that when consumed it was less intoxicating and less damaging to one’s health. The petty-bourgeois conditions under which it was distilled at that time and the still undeveloped demand, which was more concerned with quality than quantity, made it possible almost everywhere to store the product in cellars for years, thus giving it a less harmful character as the more damaging constituent parts were converted in a gradual chemical process. At the end of the last century we thus find distilling being carried out on a fairly wide scale mainly restricted to a few towns—Münster, Ulrichstein, Nordhausen and others—and their products usually bearing the epithet “old”.

About the beginning of this century the distilleries increased in number in the countryside as side-lines of the larger landed proprietors and tenants, especially in Hanover and Brunswick. They found a market, on the one hand, due to the steady increase in the consumption of schnapps, and, on the other hand, due to the needs of the ever-growing and ever-warring armies which, for their part, again carried the taste for schnapps constantly further afield. Thus after the peace of 1814 the distilling industry was able to extend further and further and, in the form already described, quite different from that of the old town distilleries, to gain a firm foothold as a side-line run by the managers of large estates on the Lower Rhine, Prussian Saxony, Brandenburg and Lusatia.

However, the turning-point for the distilling industry was the discovery that one could produce schnapps profitably not only from grain but also from potatoes. That revolutionised the whole industry. On the one hand, the main activity of the distilling industry shifted once and for all from the town to the countryside, and the petty-bourgeois producers of the good old drink were ousted more and more by the infamous producers of potato rot-gut, the big landowners. On the other hand, and this is historically of much greater significance, the big grain-distilling landowner was displaced by the big potato-distilling landowner; the distilling industry moved increasingly from the fertile grain-growing land to the infertile potato-growing land, in other words from North-West Germany to North-East Germany—to Old Prussia east of the Elbe.

This turning-point came at the time of the harvest failure and famine of 1816. Despite the improved harvests of the two succeeding years, grain prices remained so high as a consequence of the continuing export of grain to England and other countries that it became almost impossible to use grain for distilling purposes. A hogshead of schnapps, which had only cost 39 talers in 1813, was sold in 1817 for 70 talers. At this point potatoes replaced grain and in 1823 a hogshead of schnapps was to be had for as little as 14 to 17 talers!

How was it, then, that the poor Junkers from the east of the Elbe, allegedly totally ruined by the war and the sacrifices they had made for their fatherland, obtained the means with which to convert their pressing mortgage debts into lucrative schnapps distilleries? It is true that the favourable trading conditions of the years 1816 to 1819 brought them very good returns and increased their credit as a result of the generally rising price of land, but this was far from sufficient. On top of that our patriotic Junkers received, in the first instance, state aid in various direct and indirect forms, and, secondly, there was a further factor at work, to which we must devote our particular attention. It will be remembered that in Prussia in 1811 the commutation of statute labour, and the dispute between the peasants and the landlords in general, were settled in law in such a way that payment in kind could be transformed into money payment. This could be turned into capital and commuted either in cash in specific instalments, or by the peasant ceding a piece of land to the lord, or in a combination of cash and of land. This law remained a dead letter until the high grain prices of 1816 to 1819 put the peasants in a position to proceed with commutation. From 1819 onwards commutation went ahead rapidly in Brandenburg, more slowly in Pomerania, and slower still in Posen and Prussia. The money thus lawfully but unjustly misappropriated from the peasants (for they had had statute labour unjustly forced upon them), in so far as it was not immediately squandered according to traditional aristocratic custom, was employed mainly to finance the setting-up of distilleries. The distilling industry also expanded to the same extent in the three other provinces mentioned, as the peasants provided the financial means for it through the commutation of their statute labour. The schnapps industry of the Prussian Junkers was thus founded literally on the money taken from the peasants. And business boomed, particularly after 1825. Just two years later, in 1827, 125 million quarts of schnapps were distilled in Prussia, that is 1/2 quarts per head of the population, at an overall value of 15 million talers; in contrast to this, Hanover, fifteen years earlier Germany’s first schnapps state, produced a mere 18 million quarts.

It will be evident that from now on the whole of Germany was caught in a veritable tidal wave of Prussian potato rot-gut, at least wherever the single states or customs unions of single states did not manage to stem the flow by raising customs barriers against it. Fourteen talers an awm consisting of 180 quarts, that is a quart for 2 groschen and 4 pfennigs on the wholesale market! Drunkenness, which previously had cost three and four times as much, was something available, day in day out, even to the very poorest now that a man could stay deeply under the influence for a whole week at a cost of 15 silver groschen.

The effects of these quite unprecedentedly low schnapps prices, which were felt at different places at different times but almost always completely without warning, were quite incredible. I can still well remember how, at the end of the twenties, the low cost of schnapps suddenly overtook the industrial area of the Lower Rhine and the Mark. In the Berg country particularly, and most notably in Elberfeld-Barmen, the mass of the working population fell victim to drink. From nine in the evening, in great crowds and arm in arm, taking up the whole width of the street, the “soused men” tottered their way, bawling discordantly, from one inn to the other and finally back home. Given the level of education of the workers at that time and the utter hopelessness of their situation, it was not surprising. Especially in blessed Wuppertal, where for sixty years one industry has given way to another, and where as a result one section of the workers was constantly oppressed if not unemployed, whilst another section (at that time the dye-workers) was well paid by the prevailing standards. And if, as was the case at that time, the workers of Wuppertal had only a choice between the earthly schnapps of the public houses and the divine schnapps of the pietistic priests—is it any wonder that they preferred the former, as bad as it was?

And it was very bad. It was sent out and drunk new, just as it emerged from the cooling apparatus, without further purification and containing all its fusel oils. All schnapps that is distilled from the husks of pressed grapes, from beet, grain or potatoes contains this fusel oil, which is a mixture of higher alcohols, i.e., of liquids of a similar composition to that of ordinary alcohol but containing more carbon and hydrogen (including primary propyl alcohol, isobutyl alcohol, but overwhelmingly amyl alcohol). All these types of alcohol are more noxious than the normal spirits of wine (ethyl alcohol), and the dose required to produce a toxic effect is much lower than with the latter. Professor Binz at Bonn proved recently, after conducting numerous experiments, that the intoxicating effects of our alcoholic beverages, as well as the unpleasant after-effects they produce in the form of a laudable hangover or the more serious symptoms of illness and poisoning, are attributable much less to the usual spirits of wine, or ethyl alcohol, than to the higher alcohols, in other words fusel oil. Nor do they simply have a more intoxicating and more destructive effect, they also determine the nature of the intoxication. Everyone knows from his own observations, if not from experience, what the different effects on the brain are from getting drunk on wine (even different sorts of wine), on beer and on schnapps. The more fusel oil in the drink and the more unwholesome the composition of that fusel oil, the more excessive and wild the intoxication. But it is well known that of all distilled spirits new, unpurified potato schnapps contains the greatest quantity of fusel oil with the least favourable composition. The effect of such unusually large quantities of that drink on such an excitable and volatile population as that to be found in the Berg country was therefore just what one might have expected. The drunkenness proved to be of a totally different nature. That merry-making which previously ended in good-natured tipsiness and only seldom in excess, where of course it was then not uncommon for the knife to be involved, that kind of merry-making now degenerated into a riot and inevitably ended in a brawl, there never being any lack of knife wounds, and the fatal stabbings constantly increasing in their frequency. The priests put it down to increasing godlessness, the lawyers and other philistines to the dances held in public houses. The real cause was Prussian fusel oil flooding onto the scene, simply having its normal physiological effect and dispatching hundreds of poor souls off to prison, to work on fortress construction.

The acute effect of cheap schnapps continued to be felt for years, until it gradually more or less petered out. But its influence on people’s morals lingered on; for the working class schnapps was more of a need in life than it had been before, and its quality, even if it did improve a little, stayed well below that of the old grain spirit.

And what happened in the Berg country also happened elsewhere. At no time were the lamentations of the philistines about an increase in excessive schnapps consumption among the workers more widespread, more unanimous and more clamorous than during the period from 1825 to 1835. It is even open to question whether or not that state of dullness in which the North German workers passively witnessed the events of 1830, without being affected by them, was not due largely to schnapps, which at that time had them more than ever in its grip. Serious and especially successful uprisings occurred only in wine-producing regions, or in those German states which had more or less protected themselves against Prussian schnapps by mea’ns of tariffs. That was not the first time that schnapps had saved the Prussian state.

The only industry to have had more devastating direct effects—and even then not on its own people, but on foreigners— was the Anglo-Indian opium industry used to poison China.

In the meantime schnapps production continued on its merry way, expanding further and further eastwards, and forcing acre upon acre of the North-East German desert of sand and marshes to surrender to the potato. Not content with bestowing its favours on its own country, it strove to make the blessings of old-Prussian fusel oil available to foreign lands. Ordinary schnapps was distilled once more, so that part of the water contained in it could be removed, and the aqueous and impure spirit of wine thus obtained was called Spirit, which is the Prussian translation of the word Spiritus. The higher alcohols all have higher boiling points than ethyl alcohol. Whilst the latter boils at 78 V2° on the centigrade thermometer, the boiling point of primary propyl alcohol is 97°, that of isobutyl alcohol 109° and that of amyl alcohol 132°. Now one would think that with careful distillation at least the major part of the latter, the main constituent of fusel oil, would be left behind along with a part of the isobutyl alcohol, and that at the very most a part of the latter would be distilled along with most of the primary propyl alcohol, which, however, is present in fusel oil in only very small quantities. But even the scientific chemists forgo using distillation to separate the three lower alcohols concerned here, and can only extract amyl alcohol from fusel oil by a process of fractionated distillation, which cannot be applied in a distillery. As it is, distilling in a schnapps factory in the country is a pretty unsophisticated business. No wonder then that the Sprit produced at the beginning of the forties still contained considerable amounts of fusel oil, as anyone could easily tell by smelling it; pure or only aqueous spirit of wine is almost odourless.

This Sprit went mainly to Hamburg. What happened to it? Part went to countries which did not bar its entry by means of tariffs—Stettin was also involved in this export trade; but the major portion was used in Hamburg and Bremen for the adulteration of rum. Distilled in the West Indies partly from sugar cane itself, but mainly from the waste products of the cane during the sugar-making process, this was the only spirit still able to compete, because of its low production costs, with potato schnapps as a sort of luxury drink for the masses. Now to produce a “fine” but also cheap rum, they would take, for example, a barrel of really fine Jamaica rum, three to four barrels of cheap, bad Barbary rum and two to three barrels of Prussian potato Sprit—and this or a similar mixture produced the required result. This “poison”, as merchants themselves involved in the adulteration have called it in my presence, was shipped to Denmark, Sweden, Norway and Russia. To a very significant extent, however, it also made its way up the Elbe or via Stettin to the regions from which the noble Sprit had originally come, and was partly drunk there as rum, and partly smuggled into Austria and Poland.

The Hamburg merchants did not stop at producing adulterated rum. It was their own peculiar kind of ingenuity which made them the first to see the world-shaking role that Prussian schnapps was destined to play in the future. They had already tried their hands at all sorts of other drinks, and even at the end of the thirties nobody in the North German territories outside Prussia who knew anything about wine would take French white wines from Hamburg, because it was generally claimed that they were sweetened there with lead acetate and thus contaminated. Nevertheless, potato Sprit soon became the basis for an evergrowing liquor adulteration business. Rum was followed by cognac, which required somewhat more skill in its treatment. Soon they began treating wine with Sprit, and finally they got round, without using any wine at all, to producing port and Spanish wines from Sprit, water and vegetable juices, which were often displaced by chemicals. Business flourished all the more when such practices were either directly forbidden in many countries, or came so close to breaking the law that it was not considered advisable to try one’s hand at them. But Hamburg was the centre of unrestricted free trade, and so “for Hamburg’s health and happiness” they went on adulterating to their heart’s content.

However, the adulteration business did not remain a monopoly for long. After the revolution of 1848, when in France the exclusive domination of big finance capital and a few prominent industrial magnates was temporarily replaced by the rule of the whole bourgeoisie, the French producers and traders began to realise what magic powers lay dormant in such a barrel of Prussian potato Sprit They began to adulterate their cognac whilst it was still at home instead of sending it abroad in its pure state, and even more to ennoble the cognac (which is what, for the sake of brevity, I call all schnapps distilled from the husks of pressed grapes) intended for home consumption by adding considerable quantities of Prussian potato Sprit. This made cognac—the only spirit to be consumed on a large scale in France—significantly cheaper. The Second Empire supported this manoeuvre, of course, in the interests of the suffering masses, and thus we find on the fall of the Napoleonic dynasty that, thanks to the merciful effects of old Prussian schnapps, drunkenness, almost unknown there previously, had grown to significant proportions in France.

An unprecedented series of bad vintages and finally the commercial treaty of 1860, which opened up England to the French wine trade, gave rise to a new advance. The weak wines from bad years, whose acidity was not to be removed with sugar, needed to have alcohol added to them so that they would keep. They were therefore mixed with Prussian Sprit Furthermore, the English palate was accustomed to strong wines—the natural French country wines, which were now sent for export in great quantities, were too weak and too cold for the English. What better to give them robustness and warmth than Prussian Sprit? Bordeaux increasingly became the centre for the adulteration of French, Spanish and Italian wines, which were transformed there into “fine Bordeaux”, and—for the use of Prussian Sprit.

Indeed, Spanish and Italian wines. Since the consumption of French red wines—and no bourgeois will drink any other—has increased so enormously in England, North and South America, and the colonies, even the almost inexhaustible abundance of wines in France no longer suffices. Almost all the useful vintage from Northern Spain, including the whole of the vintage from Rioja in the Ebro valley, which is rich in wines, goes to Bordeaux. And Genoa, Leghorn and Naples send whole shiploads of wine to the same place. Whilst Prussian Sprit makes these wines capable of withstanding transport by sea, the export trade forces u p the price of wine in Spain and Italy to such an extent that it is way beyond the means of the working population, who used to drink it every day. In its place they drink schnapps, and the main ingredient of that schnapps is once again—Prussian potato Sprit Indeed, Mr. von Kardorff complains in the Reichstag that in Italy this is not yet happening on a large enough scale.

Wherever we turn we find Prussian Sprit Prussian Sprit extends incomparably further than the arm of the imperial German government. And wherever we find this Sprit it serves one main purpose—that of adulteration. It is used to make Southern European wines suitable for shipment and thus to deprive the indigenous working population of them. And just as Achilles’ lance heals the wounds which it has made, so Prussian Sprit at the same time offers the working classes who have been robbed of their wine a substitute in the form of adulterated schnapps! Potato Sprit is to Prussia what iron and cottons are to England, the article which represents her on the world market. The latest adept and, at the same time, regenerator of socialism, Mr. Eugen Dühring, may well therefore extol the virtues of distilling as “primarily a ... natural link (of industry) with agriculture”, and proclaim triumphantly:

“The production of spirits is of such significance that it will tend to be underrated rather than overrated!”

To be sure, the Prussian for “Anch’io son pittore” (I too am a painter, as Correggio said) is “I too am a schnapps distiller”.

However, we have by no means exhausted the wondrous exploits of Prussian potato schnapps.

“Whereas in earlier times,” says Mr. von Kardorff, “there used to be roughly 1,000 people to the square mile living in these parts, the land is now able to support roughly 3,000 people per square mile as a result of Sprit manufacture.”

And on the whole that is correct. I do not know what period Mr. von Kardorff refers to when he quotes the population as being a thousand per square mile. There must certainly have been such a period. If, however, we exclude the provinces of Saxony and Silesia, where distilling has a less conspicuous part to play alongside other industries, and also Posen, the greater part of which frustrates all government efforts by continuing to display no especial desire to be anything other than Polish, then we are left with the three provinces of Brandenburg, Pomerania and Prussia. Together these three provinces cover a surface area of 2,415 square miles. In 1817 they had a total population of 3,479,825, or 1,441 per square mile; in 1871 it was 7,432,407, or 3,078 per square mile. We quite agree with Mr. von Kardorff in regarding the growth in population mainly as a consequence, direct or indirect, of schnapps distilling. If we add the Altmark, northern agricultural Lower Silesia, and the predominantly German part of Posen, where the population will have developed in a similar way, then we have the actual schnapps-producing area, and at one and the same time the heart of the Prussian monarchy. And this opens up an entirely new perspective. Distilling now reveals itself as being the real material basis of present-day Prussia. Without it the Prussian Junkers would have perished; their estates would have been bought up in part by large land magnates who would have formed a less numerous aristocracy along English lines; in part they would have been broken up and would have formed the basis for an independent peasantry. Without it the heart of Prussia would have remained a land with a population of about 2,000 inhabitants to the square mile, incapable of playing any part in history, either good or bad, until bourgeois industry developed sufficiently to rule the roost socially and perhaps politically here as well. Distilling has given a different turn to developments. On ground which produces practically nothing except potatoes and clod-hopping Junkers, and the latter en masse, it was able to defy the competition of the world. Favoured more and more by demand—for reasons already explained—it was able to elevate itself to the position of the world’s central schnapps-producing factory. Under the prevailing social relations, this meant nothing other than the development, on the one hand, of a class of medium-size landowners whose younger sons provided the main material for the army officers and for the bureaucracy, i.e., a new lease of life for the Junkers, and, on the other hand, the development of a relatively rapidly growing class of semibondsmen, from which the mass of the “core regiments” of the army are recruited. If anyone is interested in the situation of this mass of workers, who are free in name, but for the most part kept almost completely in bondage to the squire by means of annual contracts, through payments in kind, through housing conditions, and finally by the manorial police, which with the advent of the new district regulations only assumed a different form, he can consult the writings of Professor von der Goltz. In short, then, the question is: What was it that enabled Prussia more or less to digest the morsels west of the Elbe that it swallowed in 1815, to stifle the revolution in Berlin in 1848, to assume the leadership of German reaction in 1849 despite the uprisings in Rhenish Westphalia, to wage war with Austria in 1866, and in 1871 to get the whole of Little Germany to accept the leadership of this most backward, most stable, least educated, still semi-feudal part of Germany? It was the distilling of schnapps.

II

Meanwhile let us return to the Reichstag. The protagonists in the debate are Mr. von Kardorff, Mr. von Delbrück and the Hamburg representative in the Federal Council Krüger. Listening to this debate, it seems almost as if we are doing a shameful wrong to Prussian potato spirits. It is not Prussian but rather Russian Sprit which is causing all the trouble. Mr. von Kardorff complains that Hamburg industrialists are converting Russian schnapps (which, as Mr. Krüger expressly emphasises, is distilled from grain, not potatoes) into Sprit, "sending it out as German Sprit, and thus damaging the reputation of German Sprit". Mr. Delbrück "has been told that passing it off as Sprit in this way would involve great difficulties, since as yet no one has succeeded in producing odourless Sprit from Russian schnapps as has been done with German schnapps". However, he added cautiously: "Of course, gentlemen, I am in no position to judge."

So, it is not Prussian potato spirit but Russian grain spirit which is causing all the trouble. Prussian potato Sprit is "odourless", i.e. free from fusel oil; no one has as yet managed to produce an odourless Russian Sprit from grain, and it therefore contains fusel oil, and if it is sold as Prussian Sprit, then it detracts from the reputation that the latter has as being free from fusel oil. If we accept this, however, then we have, in a roguish and most disloyal manner, slandered Prussian Sprit, free from fusel oil as it is. Let us examine the position as it really is.

Indeed a process exists for removing fusel oil from schnapps by treating it with red-hot charcoal. As a consequence of this the Sprit which has come onto the market recently has generally contained less fusel oil. However, there is the following difference between the two kinds of Sprit that we are concerned with here: grain spirit can be freed of fusel oil completely without any great effort, whilst, on the other hand, removing fusel oil from potato Sprit is a much more difficult process, and is actually impossible in large-scale production, so that even the purest spirit distilled from potato schnapps always leaves behind a smell of fusel oil when rubbed onto the hand. Therefore it is a rule that only spirit distilled from grain is used by dispensing chemists and in the making of fine liqueurs, and never Sprit distilled from potatoes, or at least this should be the case (for adulteration takes place here too!).

And a few days after the Kölnische Zeitung reported on the above schnapps debate it carried (February 8, first page) in its miscellaneous reports the following plaintive cry from a tippler on the Rhine:

“It would be particularly desirable now to prove that potato Sprit is being added to weak wine as well. A disconcerting dazed feeling in the head afterwards does indeed point to it, too late however. Potato Sprit still has fusel oil in it, the otherwise unpleasant smell of which is concealed by the wine’s own particular taste. This kind of adulteration is among the most common.”

Finally, in order to pacify the old-Prussian schnapps distillers, Mr. Krüger lets the doubtful fact be known that Russian spirit distilled from grain is fetching four marks more on the Hamburg market than Prussian potato Sprit On February 7 the latter was quoted in Hamburg at 35 marks for 100 litres, and that means that Russian spirit fetches a price which is 12% better than that paid for Prussian Sprit, the reputation of which it is allegedly damaging!

And now, after hearing all these facts, look at the expression of injured innocence of this maligned, “odourless”, reputationconscious and virtuous Prussian product, allegedly so completely free of fusel oil, and which costs only 35 pfennigs a litre, cheaper than beer! If one examines that debate in the light of these facts, is one not tempted to ask: Just exacdy who is making a fool of whom?

The benign influence of Prussian fusel oil is world-embracing, for it finds its way, with potato Sprit, into every kind of drink. From the sour, weak and badly seasoned Mosel wine and Rhine wine, which is magically transformed with the aid of potato sugar and potato Sprit into Brauneberger and Niersteiner, from the bad red wine which has been flooding England since Gladstone’s commercial treaty, and which is called “Gladstone” there, to the Château Lafitte and champagne, port and Madeira, which the bourgeois drink in India, China, Australia and America, there is not a drink in whose composition Prussian fusel oil does not play a part. The production of these drinks is flourishing wherever wine is grown and wherever wine is stored in great quantities, and the producers hail potato Sprit with dithyrambic shouts of joy. But what about the consumers? Well, the consumers become aware of it when they suffer that “disconcerting dazed feeling in the head”, which is how fusel oil confers its blessings on one, and they try to avoid suffering its blessings. In Italy, as Mr. von Kardorff says, the commercial treaty is applied in such a way as to make Prussian Sprit pay far too high a tariff. Belgium, America and England make it impossible to export Sprit to them by levying high tariffs. In France the customs officials stick red labels on barrels of Sprit, so as to distinguish them as Prussian—which is really quite the first time that the French customs officials have done anything beneficial to the community! In short, things have gone so far that Mr. von Kardorff cries out in desperation:

“Gentlemen, if you visualise the position of the German Sprit industry you will find that all countries are closing their borders to our Sprit in the greatest of fear!”

Naturally enough. The gracious effects of this Sprit have gradually become known the world over, and the only way to avoid that “disconcerting dazed feeling in the head” is not to allow the confounded rot-gut into the country in the first place.

And now, on top of this, a storm cloud is rising from the East, heavy and moist, above the heads of the hard-pressed schnapps Junkers. Their big brother in Russia, the last refuge of all time-honoured institutions for combatting modern destructive mania, has also begun to distill schnapps and to export it, and it is grain schnapps, and, what is more, he is supplying it just as cheaply as the Prussian Junkers their potato schnapps. The production and export of this Russian schnapps is increasing year by year, and, though it may so far have been purified into Sprit in Hamburg, Mr. Delbrück now tells us that

“in the Russian ports ... already in the process of being constructed are a number of plants, equipped with first-rate apparatus for the purification of Russian schnapps”,

and he tells the Junker gentlemen to expect Russian competition to outstrip them with every passing year. Mr. von Kardorff is only too well aware of this and he demands that the government forbid the transporting of Russian spirits across Germany forthwith.

As a free conservative member of parliament, Mr. von Kardorff really ought to be in a better position to appreciate the attitude of the German imperial government with respect to Russia. After the annexation of Alsace-Lorraine, and the scandalous war reparations of five thousand million, as a result of which France was bound to become an ally of each and every enemy of Germany, and given the policy of seeking to be respected, or rather feared, but never looked on with affection by others, there remained only one choice: either quickly to defeat Russia as well, or to secure the alliance with Russia (in as much as Russia can be depended upon) by becoming the obedient servant of Russian diplomacy. As they were unable to decide in favour of the first alternative, they were obliged to choose the second. Prussia, and with it the empire, is once more as dependent on Russia as it was after 1815 and 1850; and just as in 1815 the “Holy Alliance” serves as the cloak for this dependence. The result of all those glorious victories is that Germany continues, as before, to be the fifth wheel on the coach of Europe. And then Bismarck is surprised that the German public should continue to be concerned about affairs abroad where the really crucial decisions are being taken, instead of being concerned about the doings of the imperial government, which is of no consequence in Europe, and about the speeches in the Reichstag, which is of no consequence in Germany! Forbid the transporting of Russian Sprit across Germany! I should like to see the Imperial Chancellor who would dare such a thing without at the same time having a declaration of war against Russia safely in his pocket! And with Mr. von Kardorff making such a curious demand of the imperial government one might almost be led to believe that not only drinking schnapps but even the very act of distilling it was sufficient to cloud the mind. For indeed more famous distillers of schnapps than Mr. von Kardorff have lately made up their minds to do things for which, from their own point of view, there has been absolutely no rational explanation.

For the rest, nothing is easier to understand than the fact that the Russian competition should be filling our schnapps Junkers with an uncanny feeling of dread. In the interior of Russia there are great tracts of land where grain is to be had just as cheaply as potatoes are in Prussia. In addition to that, fuel is mostly cheaper in Russia than in our distilling districts. All the necessary material conditions are on hand. Small wonder then that a section of the Russian nobility should do just as the Prussian Junkers do and invest in distilleries the money advanced by the state as credit to the peasants for commutation of statute labour. Nor is it any wonder that these distilleries should spread rapidly, given the constantly growing market and the preference that there will be for schnapps distilled from grain costing the same or slighdy more than schnapps distilled from potatoes, and that even now the time can be envisaged when their product pushes Prussian potato Sprit off the market completely. Complaining and moaning will be to no avail. The laws of capitalist production, as long as it continues to exist, are just as unrelenting for Junkers as for Jews. Thanks to the Russian competition, the day is fast approaching when Holy Ilion will collapse, when the glorious Prussian schnapps industry will vanish from the world market and continue at most to befuddle the home market. But on the day that the distiller’s helmet is wrested from the Prussian Junkers and they are left only with their coats of arms or at most their army helmets, on that day Prussia is finished. Irrespective of the course that world history might otherwise take, and disregarding the possibility, probability or even inevitability of fresh wars or upheavals—the competition from Russian schnapps alone is bound to ruin Prussia by destroying the industry which keeps the agriculture of the eastern provinces at its present level of development. In so doing, it also destroys the conditions essential for the life of the Junkers east of the Elbe and of their 3,000 bondsmen to the square mile; and in doing that, it destroys the basis of the Prussian state: the material that goes to make up the officers as well as the non-commissioned officers and the soldiers who obey their orders whatever happens, and in addition to that the material that goes to make up the core of the bureaucracy, the material that stamps its specific character on present-day Prussia. With the collapse of schnapps distilling, Prussian militarism collapses, and without it Prussia is nothing. Then those eastern provinces will sink back into that station in Germany that befits them in accordance with their low population density, their industry, which is enslaved to agriculture, their semi-feudal conditions, and their lack of bourgeois development and general culture. Then, relieved of the pressure of this semi-medieval rule, the remaining regions of the German Empire will heave a sigh of relief and assume the position befitting them in accordance with their industrial development and more advanced culture. The eastern provinces themselves will seek out other industries, less dependent on agriculture and conceding less ground to the feudal mode of production, and in the intervening period they will place their army at the disposal not of the Prussian state but of Social-Democracy. The rest of the world will rejoice to see the end at last of Prussian fusel-oil poisoning; but the Prussian Junkers and the Prussian state, then at last “dissolved into Germany”, will have to console themselves with the words of the poet:

Surviving immortal in song,

In life it must perish.