Page:The War and the Future.djvu/6

 ascendancy, that there could ever be too much reason on earth. There is no danger that people will some day become emotionless angels, which, to be sure, would be very dull. But that they should become beasts, which as a matter of fact would be a little too interesting, that, as we have seen, can readily happen. This tendency is much stronger in human beings than the anemic angelic one, and it is only necessary, through general glorification of instincts to set free the evil ones which are always ready to appropriate such a glorification to themselves, in order to bring the bestial tendencies into triumphant ascendancy. It is easy and self-indulgent to throw oneself on the side of nature against the mind, that is to say on the side which in any case is always the stronger. Simple generosity and a slight sense of humane responsibility should decide us to protect and nourish the poor little flame of mind and reason upon earth that it may shine and warm us a little better.

Freedom and justice have long ceased to be banal; they arc vital; and to think of them as boring, simply means an acceptance of the fascistic pseudo-revolutionary fraud that violence and mass-deception are the last word and most up-to-date. The better mind knows that the really new thing in the world which the living spirit is called upon to serve is something totally different, namely, a social democracy and a humanism which, instead of being caught in a cowardly relativism, have the courage once more to distinguish between good and evil.

That is what the European peoples did. They refused to submit to evil, to Hitler's New Order, to slavery. And I should like to take this opportunity to say a word in honor of this now deeply depressed part of the earth. It may well be that we Europeans will only play the part of "Graeculi" in the Roman world of power that will arise out of this war, whose capitals will be Washington, London, and Moscow; but this diminutive role should not decrease our justifiable pride in our old homeland. How much easier, how much less arduous would it have been for the European peoples if they had accepted Hitler's infamous New Order; if they had 6