I.
It is the purpose of the following article to single out one aspect of the war which has been strangely neglected. It is our purpose to emphasize the influence which the obsession of one particular idea, the German race theory, has exercised over the German mind and the part which it has played in bringing about the war of the nations. False ideas have been the dragon’s teeth from which have risen the legions of five continents. Amongst those false ideas the most deadly, the most fatal, has been the German heresy of race, the theory of race inequality and race antagonism. It is in the name of that race heresy, in the name of Germanism and Pan-Germanism, of Slavism and Pan-Slavism, of Saxonism and Pan-Saxonism, the war is being waged.
We read the following passage in a recent book by Sven Hedin, the official chronicler of the German armies:
“Here is a (German) reservist. What a tremendous figure! What can Latins, Slavs, Celts, Japs, Negroes, Hindus, Ghurkas, Turcos, and whatever they are called, do against such strapping giants of the true Germanic type? His features are superbly noble, and he seems pleased with his day’s work. He does not regret that he has offered his life for Germany’s just cause.”
In this odious passage we have in a few lines the whole history and the whole philosophy of the tragedy. We have the spirit with which the Germans have waged the war, we have the motive for which they have waged it, and we have the ultimate purpose which they hope to achieve—namely, to force upon a subjected Europe the rule of the super-race of Treitschke and the bionda bestia of Nietzsche.
In former times, in the so-called “Dark Age,” nations would fight for the human, rational, but impracticable principle of orthodoxy. To-day we are fighting for the inhuman, for the equally impracticable and immoral principle of race antagonism. Germans fight because through their veins courses the red blood of the Teutons of Tacitus. They are fighting because they are convinced that they have the Might and the Right and the Duty of crushing the French and the Russians, because through French veins courses the tainted blood of the Gauls of Cæsar, and because through the veins of the Slavs courses the white fluid of the slave and the yellow fluid of the Tatar.