Page:The four horsemen of the Apocalypse - (Los cuatro jinetes de Apocalipsis) (IA cu31924014386738).djvu/181

 remedy for the most unconfessable of diseases, and the genital scourge continues afflicting the world. And all these errors were representing great fortunes, each saving panacea bringing into existence an industrial corporation selling its products at high prices—as though suffering were a privilege of the rich. How different from the bluff Pasteur and other clever men of the inferior races who have given their discoveries to the world without stooping to form monopolies!

"German science," continued Tchernoff, "has given much to humanity, I admit that; but the science of other nations has done as much. Only a nation puffed up with conceit could imagine that it has done everything for civilization, and the others nothing.… Apart from their learned specialists, what genius has been produced in our day by this Germany which believes itself so transcendent? Wagner, the last of the romanticists, closes an epoch and belongs to the past. Nietzsche took pains to proclaim his Polish origin and abominated Germany, a country, according to him, of middle-class pedants. His Slavism was so pronounced that he even prophesied the overthrow of the Prussians by the Slavs.… And there are others. We, although a savage people, have given the world of modern times an admirable moral grandeur. Tolstoi and Dostoievsky are world-geniuses. What names can the Germany of William II put ahead of these?… His country was the country of music, but the Russian musicians of to-day are more original than the mere followers of Wagner, the copyists who take refuge in orchestral exasperations in order to hide their mediocrity.… In its time of stress the German nation had men of genius, before Pan-Germanism had been born, when the Empire did not exist. Goethe, Schiller, Beethoven were subjects of little principalities. They received influence from other