Page:Counter-currents, Agnes Repplier, 1916.djvu/270

Counter-Currents whom we should hiss and howl into the abyss of Hell."

There was plenty of disaffection in 1776, plenty in 1861; but we fought our two great wars without dishonour. If the Germans, well aware of our unpreparedness and of our internal dissensions, have flouted us unsparingly, it is because they are, as they have always been, densely incapable of reading the souls of men. Let us not add to our own peril by misreading the soul of Germany. We lack her discipline, we lack her unity, we lack her efficiency, the splendid result of thirty years' devotion to a single purpose. It avails us very little to analyze the "falling sickness" which has made her so mighty. Dr. Lightner Witmer, in a profoundly thoughtful and dispassionate paper on "The Relation of Intelligence to Efficiency," diagnoses her disease as "primitivism,"—"meaning thereby a reversion in manners, customs, and principles to what is 254