City of Endless Night

by Milo Hastings

"Yes," I replied very gravely, "I am with you although I cannot fully understand on what you base your hope."

"Our hope," replied Zimmern, "is out there in the world from whence come those flying men who rain bombs on the roof of Berlin and for ever keep us patching it. We must get word to them. We must throw ourselves upon the humanity of our enemies and ask them to save us."

"But," I questioned, in my excitement, "what can Germany expect of the enemy? She has made war against the world for centuries--will that world permit Germany to live could they find a way to destroy her?"

"As a nation, no, but as men, yes. Men do not kill men as individuals, they only make war against a nation of men. As long as Germany is capable of making war against the world so long will the world attempt to destroy her. You, Colonel Armstadt, hold in your protium secret the power of Germany to continue the war against the world. Because you were about to gain that power I risked my own life to aid you in getting a wider knowledge. Because you now hold that power I risk it again by asking you to use it to destroy Germany and save the Germans. The men who are with me in this cause, and for whom I speak, are but a few. The millions materially alive, are spiritually dead. The world alone can give them life again as men. Even though a few million more be destroyed in the giving have not millions already been destroyed? What if you do save Germany now--what does it mean merely that we breed millions more like we now have, soulless creatures born to die like worms in the ground, brains working automatically, stamping out one sort of idea, like machines that stamp out buttons--or mere mouths shouting like phonographs before this gaudy show of royalty?"

"But," I said, "you speak for the few emancipated minds; what of all these men who accept the system--you call them slaves, yet are they not content with their slavery, do they want to be men of the world or continue here in their bondage and die fighting to keep up their own system of enslavement?"

"It makes no difference what they want," replied Zimmern, in a voice that trembled with emotion; "we bred them as slaves to the kultur of Germany, the thing to do is to stop the breeding."

"But how," I asked, "can men who have been beaten into the mould of the ox ever be restored to their humanity?"

"The old ones cannot," sighed Zimmern; "it was always so; when a people has once fallen into evil ways the old generation can never be wholly redeemed, but youth can always be saved--youth is plastic."

"But the German race," I said, "has not only been mis-educated, it has been mis-bred. Can you undo inheritance? Can this race with its vast horde of workers bred for a maximum of muscle and a minimum of brains ever escape from that stupidity that has been bred into the blood?"

"You have been trained as a chemist," said Zimmern, "you despair of the future because you do not understand the laws of inheritance. A specialized type of man or animal is produced from the selection of the extreme individuals. That you know. But what you do not know is that the type once established does not persist of its own accord. It can only be maintained by the rigid continuance of the selection. The average stature of man did not change a centimetre in a thousand years, till we came in with our meddlesome eugenics. Leave off our scientific meddling and the race will quickly revert to the normal type.