Page:"The next war"; an appeal to common sense (IA thenextwarappeal01irwi).pdf/39

 performed against other citizens of the state, became holy when performed for the state.

War was the highest manifestation of the state, the supreme act which gave it glory, the opportunity for the subject to prove his devotion. War was good in itself. It was, first of all, natural. All biological life was a struggle. The weak went down, the strong survived; by this process the species evolved and improved. So, the weaker races go down before the stronger, for the improvement of the human breed. Of course, your own race was the strongest, the most worthy of survival. Races grew soft in peace, strong in war. The talk about doing away with warfare was “immoral, unnatural, degrading.”

Such, briefly, were the ideas upon which Germany was being fed. We all know that, I suppose. Most of us have heard of Bernhardi and his book “Germany and the Next War”—the extreme expression of this view. What we do not perhaps appreciate is that such opinions were not peculiar to Germany. In the Great War, in the settlement after the Great War, Europe was divided not only by a horizontal