New York Times Current History: The European War, Vol 1, No. 1: From the Beginning to March, 1915, With IndexVarious
History
New York Times Current History: The European War, Vol 1, No. 1: From the Beginning to March, 1915, With Index
Various
World War, 1914-1918
In everything the Germans must be unique--in their women, their God,
their wine, their loyalty. The war which the Germans wage against us
strikes the world with horror and terror, because it is in the full
force of the term "the German way, _die deutsche Art_, the German war."
As the world recognizes this astonishing proposition it asks with
anxiety, what may be its future relations to Germany? Knowingly and
systematically, Germany opposes to all Hellenic, Christian, humane
civilizations the devastating theory of the Huns. True, after the war
she will claim that she has done nothing but conform, often with pain,
to the conditions of ideal and divine war, and she will appear willing
to pardon to her enemies the cruelties she has had to inflict upon them.
Decidedly, the world will refuse to admire this horrible magnanimity
which on the first impulse of resistance becomes savagery. Today the
veil is torn away. German culture is shown to be a scientific barbarity.
The world, which means in the future to rid itself of all despotism,
will not compromise with the despotism of barbarity.
But what a disappointment and what a grief! Formerly, Germany was held
to be a great nation. Its praises were sounded in many a land of solid
and high culture. The German tradition once held other doctrines than
those we have now seen devolop under the hands of Prussia. Germanism, as
the Prussians formulate it, consists essentially in contempt for all
other nations and in the pretension of domination. But Leibnitz--as
highly esteemed in the Latin world as in the German--professed a
philosophy which valued unity only under the form of harmony between
free and autonomous forces. Leibnitz exalted the multiple, the diverse,
the spontaneous. Between rival powers he sought to establish relations
which would reconcile them without changing or diminishing the value or
independence of any of them. Witness his effort at the reunion of the
Catholic and Protestant Churches. After Leibnitz came Kant. He certainly
was very much of a German. He owned, nevertheless, that he had learned
from Rousseau to honor the common man who, not being a savant, possesses
moral value far above the savant, who has no merit but science. And,
starting from the principle that every person, so far as he is capable
of moral value, is entitled to respect, he urged men to create not a
universal and despotic monarchy but a republic of nations in which each
should possess a free and independent personality.
This willingness to put liberty before unity, and respect and honor the
dignity of other nations while at the same time serving its own, was not
extinguished in Germany with Leibnitz and Kant. Permit me, my dear
Director, on this subject to indulge in some personal reminiscences.
*Treitschke Versus Bluntschli.*
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