The world is in agony. We witness the most terrible catastrophe known
to mankind--most terrible, not from its huge size, but because it is a
moral catastrophe. Through centuries of suffering and cruelty, guided
by religion, we thought we had attained to knowledge of and belief in
a public right between nations, and an honorable warfare, if warfare
must be. This has been shattered to pieces. No need to investigate
further the atrocities at Liege or Louvain. These and more have indeed
been amply proved, but what need of proof after the Lusitania school
festival? In that holiday we see the feast of _Kultur_, the Teutonic
climax. How came it to pass? Is it the same Germany who gave those two
holidays to her school children? The opera in Frankfurt, and this orgy
of barbaric blood-lust, guttural with the deep basses of the fathers
and shrill with the trebles of their young? Their young, to whom they
teach one day the gentle melodies of Lortzing, and to exult in
world-assassination on another?
Goethe said--and the words glow with new prophetic light: "Germans are
of yesterday; ... a few centuries must still elapse before ... it will
be said of them, 'It is long since they were barbarians.'" And again:
"National hatred is a peculiar thing. You will always find it
strongest and most violent where there is the lowest degree of
_Kultur_." But how came it to pass? Do the two holidays proceed from
the same _Kultur_, the same Fatherland?
They do; and nothing in the whole story of mankind is more strange
than the case of Germany--how Germany through generations has been
carefully trained for this wild spring at the throat of Europe that
she has made. The Servian assassination has nothing to do with it,
save that it accidentally struck the hour. Months and years before
that, Germany was crouching for her spring. In one respect the war she
has incubated is the old assault of Xerxes, of Alexander, of Napoleon,
of every one who has been visited by the dangerous dream of world
conquest. Only, never before has the dream been taught to a people on
such a scale, not merely because of the vast modern apparatus, but
much more because no subjects of any despot have ever been so
politically docile and credulous as the Germans.
In another respect this war resembles strikingly our own and the
French Revolution. All three were prepared and fomented by books, by
teachings from books. The American brain seized hold of certain
doctrines and generalizations of Locke, Montesquieu, Burlamaqui and
Beccaria concerning the rights of man and the consent of the governed.
The French brain nourished and inspired itself with some theorems of
the encyclopedists and of Rousseau about man's natural innocence and
the social contract. The Teutonic brain assimilated some diplomatic
and philosophic precepts laid down by Machiavelli, Nietzsche and
Treitschke. Indeed, Fichte, during the Winter of 1807-08, at the
University of Berlin, made an address to the German people which may
be accounted the first famous academic harbinger and source of the
present Teutonic state of mind. Here the parallel stops. With America
and France, war made way for independence, liberty and freedom,
political and moral; Germany would establish everywhere her absolute
military despotism. We shall reach in due course the full statement of
her creed; we are not ready for it yet.