Right Above Race

by Otto H. Kahn

I feel certain that an unprejudiced judgment can see neither crime nor shame in that act. If there were, you would be no less subject to reproach for accepting the military aid of Turks and Arabs.

5. When a country in so short a time has made such unexampled progress as Germany, and through her own capacity and the favour of fate has achieved so much of wealth, power and well-being for her people, she can well afford to indulge in the luxury of modesty and a conciliatory disposition.

A nation thus blessed ought to thank God that all is going so well with her, and should recognize that such brilliant success is bound to produce a certain amount of irritation and jealousy, just as it does in the case of an eminently successful individual.

While rejoicing in her achievement, she ought carefully to refrain from boasting or flaunting her superiority in the face of the world.

While unceasingly continuing to strive and build up, she ought to do so tactfully and with all possible consideration for her less successful neighbours.

She should know how to restrain herself and wisely to keep her ambitions within bounds; to live and let live; to regard, without jealousy or envy, possessions which are the heritage of others less efficient than herself; and to leave it to time, slowly but surely, to do its work in rewarding merit and punishing inefficiency and sloth.

Have you thought and acted thus?

Have you not, on the contrary, in the justified consciousness of your greater efficiency and more strenuous effort, allowed the fact of the great inherited advantages possessed by others to become a thorn in the flesh, and an ever-rankling bitter grievance, which dimmed your contentment and soured the joy at your achievements?

Have you not estranged and affronted and antagonized other nations—not by success in open competition with them, which I grant was far from pleasing them, but to which in the end they had come to accommodate themselves as to an unavoidable evil—but by the manner and matter of your writing, speaking and acting? Have you not made such nations your enemies by thrusting before them aims and visions of the future, calculated to arouse in them most serious alarm and apprehension, and thus eventually caused them to unite against you—not, as you think, through envy or hate, but through the much more powerful motives of self-preservation, and of fear of your aims and intentions?

In this letter, which, I am sorry to say, has assumed formidable proportions, I have tried, next to expressing my own convictions, to represent to you, as I see them, what are at this time the predominant and controlling views and sentiments among the American people. I have met with much the same ideas among the great majority of neutrals with whom I have discussed the subject—neutrals from many countries whom I have met here in the last six months.