The Unpopular Review, Number 19: July-December 1918Various
History
The Unpopular Review, Number 19: July-December 1918
Various
American periodicals
The German leaders are feverishly longing and working for an end of this
war. They see more danger from within than from the outside. The Allies
have declared that they do not expect to destroy or dismember Germany
but the little people of Germany have not said what they will or will
not do. They will not do anything if an end of the war can be made soon
with some positive gain to be shown, or apparently shown, from it. But
there is no telling what they will do otherwise, do, that is, to the men
who have sacrificed them in vain.
But they are a long-suffering people, and a philosophizing people who
have been taught that they are the race chosen of God and Nature, and
that the inevitable course of natural evolution is carrying them on to
be the Super-race of all earth. This philosophy will go a long way with
them, and whether all the shrewd, calculating, self-seeking men of the
Court and the General Staff believe it or not, it is a most useful
philosophy for them. It puts all those who do believe it in their hands.
And as I have said, many Germans do believe it. That is the great danger
of the world from the Germans; so many of them believe what they say.
JOHN FISKE
A generation with every nerve strained by the war will probably have
little patience with a statement that the generation whose activities
began soon after the middle of the last century, went through a conflict
of perhaps equal importance, but such is the fact.
Like the present conflict, that was one between an old and firmly rooted
principle that had outlived most of its usefulness and was fettering
liberty, and a new principle that meant emancipation.
The contest was between the superstition (it was not consistent enough
to justify calling it an opinion) on the one hand that man has fallen
from a condition of primitive perfection to one of degradation, and on
the other hand, the scientific demonstration that man's experience has
been one of virtually constant progress, up from protoplasm and probably
from inorganic matter. On the former view hung the mass of putrescent
and pestilent dogma that had fastened itself upon the sweet and simple
teachings of Christ.
The conflict was probably the greatest of all between truth and
superstition. The temper of it was perhaps most strikingly illustrated
when, at the meeting of the British Association in 1860, Bishop
Wilberforce asked Huxley whether it was "through his grandfather or his
grandmother that he claimed descent from a monkey," and Huxley answered:
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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