nder that the good people are asking, Have we lost faith? We
may or we may not have lost faith, but can we not see that our faith
does not give us a key to the problem? Our faith is founded on the old
prescientific conception of a universe in which good and evil are
struggling with each other, with a Supreme Being aiding and abetting the
good. We fail to appreciate that the cosmic laws are no respecters of
persons. Emerson says there is no god dare wrong a worm, but worms dare
wrong one another, and there is no god dare take sides with either. The
tides in the affairs of men are as little subject to human control as
the tides of the sea and the air. We may fix the blame of the European
war upon this government or upon that, but race antagonisms and
geographical position are not matters of choice. An island empire, like
England, is bound to be jealous of all rivals upon the sea, because her
very life, when nations clash, depends upon her control of it; and an
inland empire, like Germany, is bound to grow restless under the
pressure of contiguous states of other races. A vast empire, like
Russia, is always in danger of falling apart by its own weight. It is
fused and consolidated by a turn of events that arouse the patriotic
emotions of the whole people and unite them in a common enthusiasm.

The evolution of nations is attended by the same contingencies, the same
law of probability, the same law of the survival of the fit, as are
organic bodies. I say the survival of the fit; there are degrees of
fitness in the scale of life; the fit survive, and the fittest lead and
dominate, as did the reptiles in Mesozoic time, and the mammals in
Tertiary time. Among the mammals man is dominant because he is the
fittest. Nations break up or become extinct when they are no longer fit,
or equal to the exigencies of the struggles of life. The Roman Empire
would still exist if it had been entirely fit. The causes of its
unfitness form a long and intricate problem. Germany of to-day evidently
looks upon herself as the dominant nation, the one fittest to survive,
and she has committed herself to the desperate struggle of justifying
her self-estimate. She tramples down weaker nations as we do the stubble
of the fields. She would plough and harrow the world to plant her
Prussian _Kultur_. This _Kultur_ is a mighty good product, but we
outside of its pale think that French _Kultur_, and English _Kultur_,
and American _Kultur_ are good products