[1] Ralph Thicknesse, A Year's Journey Through France and Spain, 1777, p. 298.
[2] The last twelve words quoted are by Miss Ethel Elderton in an otherwise sober memoir (Report on the English Birth-rate, 1914, p. 237) which shows that the birth control movement has begun, just where we should expect it to begin, among the better instructed classes.
[3] J.L. Myres, "The Causes of Rise and Fall in the Population of the Ancient World," Eugenics Review, April, 1915.
[4] Roscher, Grundlagen der Nationalkonomie, 23rd ed., 1900, Bk. VI.
[5] G. Lowes Dickinson, The Civilisation of India, China, and Japan, 1914, p. 47.
VII — WAR AND DEMOCRACY
When we read our newspapers to-day we are constantly met by ingenious plans for bringing to an end the activities of Germany after the War. German military activity, it is universally agreed, must be brought to an end; Germany will have no further need of a military system save on the most modest scale. Germany must also be deprived of any colonial empire and shut out from eastward expansion. That being the case, Germany no longer needs a fleet, and must be brought back to Bismarck's naval attitude. Moreover, the industrial activities of Germany must also be destroyed; the Allied opponents of Germany will henceforth manufacture for themselves or for one another the goods they have hitherto been so foolish as to obtain from Germany, and though this may mean cutting themselves aloof from the country which has hitherto been their own best customer, that is a sacrifice to be cheerfully borne for the sake of principle. It is further argued that the world has no need of German activities in science; they are, it appears, much less valuable than we had been led to believe, and in any case no self-respecting people would encourage a science tainted by Kultur. The puzzled reader of these arguments, overlooking the fallacies they contain, may perhaps sometimes be tempted to ask: But what are Germans to be allowed to do? The implied answer is clear: Nothing.
The writers who urge these arguments with such conviction may be supposed to have an elementary knowledge of the history of the Germans. We are concerned, that is to say, with a people which has displayed an irrepressible energy, in one field or another, ever since the time, more than fifteen hundred years ago, when it excited the horror of the civilised world by sacking Rome. The same energy was manifested, a thousand years later, when the Germans again knocked at the door of Rome and drew away half the world from its allegiance to the Church. Still more recently, in yet other fields of industry and commerce and colonisation, these same Germans have displayed their energy by entering into more or less successful competition with that "Modern Rome," as some have termed it, which has its seat in the British Islands. Here is a people,—still youthful as we count age in our European world, for even the Celts had preceded them by nearly a thousand years,—which has successfully displayed its explosive or methodical force in the most diverse fields, military, religious, economic. From henceforth it is invited, by an allied army of terrified journalists, to expend these stupendous and irresistible energies on just Nothing.