[DQ] In nature the individual counts for nothing, the race for everything. Nature is pitiless in the destruction of individuals. Thousands of animal lives are consumed to feed one lion throughout its life, millions of plant lives to feed one ox. In nature the individual is as ruthlessly sacrificed as in war. In this respect war is more in harmony with the designs of nature than peace.
In peace all the manifestations of life are individualistic. Eating, drinking, sleeping, and amusing one’s self are all actions in the interest of the preservation of the individual. Even the impulse of the preservation of the kind, or of propagation, is in the last analysis individualistic in nature. It is the aspiration to save at least one part of the individual from general annihilation. The child is the part of the parents which survives after the parents’ death. All the activities of man, even the noblest, partake of a certain egoistic element. The mother in sacrificing her life to save her child is unconsciously merely sacrificing the older part in order to save the younger part, of herself. But when the very existence of the individual is in jeopardy, when life itself is at stake, then all ideals centering in altruism are cast aside, and the Satanic cynic grins, muttering the Biblical verses:
“Skin for skin, yea, all that a man hath will he give for his life.
“But put forth thine hand, and touch his bone and his flesh,
“And he will curse thee to thy face.” (Job ii, 4-5.)
But all egoistic tendencies are silent in war. Here the individual is merely an insignificant little wheel in the huge war-machine. Here the individual counts for nothing, the nation for everything, the individual must perish that the nation may flourish ever after. Now, what is the modern nation, but an idea, what is the monarch in western countries or the flag, but a symbol? Men live as happy, as content, as free in London, Brussels, Paris, or Berlin. Ostend, e. g., would not materially change its mode of life, whether it is Belgian, French, British, or German. (The semi-Asiatic Russia naturally forms an exception. Anyone who has lived near the German-Russian frontier and has observed the sunny German village with its clean paved streets, lined with pretty large-windowed brick houses, all supplied with the modern urban comforts, where tidiness and cleanliness, light and well-being, happiness and prosperity dwell; and compared with this sunshine, only a hundred yards away, on the Russian side, has seen the dirty, streetless Russian village, with its windowless, straw-roofed, low, wooden shanties where man and beast live under one roof in squalor, filth, poverty and misery—and here it is where real civilization reveals itself, not in the borrowed, French mannerism in the palace of Petrograd—will not doubt for one moment that there is a vast difference between the life under a semi-Asiatic civilization and that under western civilizations. At this corner of the world, war is utilitarian as among the barbarians in ancient times. Here the Teutonic civilization is in war against the slavery of the knout.) But what are the western nations fighting for? They are fighting for an ideal; here men give their lives for a symbol.
Herein lies the chief service of war. (War is also calling out men’s higher virtues, such as love and devotion to the fatherland, sympathy with one’s compatriots, display of sacrifice, return to simple life, etc.) It is the creator of the highest idealism, which is capable of the supreme sacrifice, life itself. Such high idealism is found only among the warlike nations of the world throughout human history. These same warlike nations, the Hebrews (the Bible is replete of war-narratives), the Greeks, the Romans and the Teutons, have also built up the higher civilizations. Only those absorbed in the category of the ideal, in the enthusiasm of humanity, can be seized by the great ecstatic impulsion to war. The vulgar, the ignorant, the selfish, engrossed in their own small affairs and engulfed in the mire of utilitarianism, for whom the only meaning, worth and work of life is barter, have no conception of the highest sacrifice, which is life, and can not comprehend the meaning of war, nor do they ever contribute to the ideal edifice of a higher civilization.
[DR] The author will follow here the discoveries of Morgan as described in his “Ancient Society.”
Morgan divides the human history into three periods—savagery, barbarism and civilization. He then subdivides the first two epochs into three stages each.
In the lower stage of savagery man lived on trees and in caves. His food consisted of fruits, thus being compelled to live in warm climates where his food was always to be had. In this stage men lived in a kind of monogamy.