England,
besides discord of suffrage and discord of labor, civil war seemed so
imminent that no one would have been surprised to hear of it any day.

So that I thought: Suppose a soul, arrived on earth from another
world, wholly ignorant of earth, without any mortal ties whatever,
were given its choice after a survey of the nations, which it should
be born in and belong to? In May, June and July, 1914, my choice would
have been, not France, not England, not America, but Germany.

It was on the seventh day of June, 1914, that Frankfurt assembled her
school children in the opera house, to further their taste and
understanding of Germany's supreme national art. Exactly eleven months
later, on May 7, 1915, a German torpedo sank the Lusitania; and the
cities of the Rhine celebrated this also for their school children.

VI

The world is in agony. We witness the most terrible catastrophe known
to mankind--most terrible, not from its huge size, but because it is a
moral catastrophe. Through centuries of suffering and cruelty, guided
by religion, we thought we had attained to knowledge of and belief in
a public right between nations, and an honorable warfare, if warfare
must be. This has been shattered to pieces. No need to investigate
further the atrocities at Liege or Louvain. These and more have indeed
been amply proved, but what need of proof after the Lusitania school
festival? In that holiday we see the feast of _Kultur_, the Teutonic
climax. How came it to pass? Is it the same Germany who gave those two
holidays to her school children? The opera in Frankfurt, and this orgy
of barbaric blood-lust, guttural with the deep basses of the fathers
and shrill with the trebles of their young? Their young, to whom they
teach one day the gentle melodies of Lortzing, and to exult in
world-assassination on another?

Goethe said--and the words glow with new prophetic light: "Germans are
of yesterday; ... a few centuries must still elapse before ... it will
be said of them, 'It is long since they were barbarians.'" And again:
"National hatred is a peculiar thing. You will always find it
strongest and most violent where there is the lowest degree of
_Kultur_." But how came it to pass? Do the two holidays proceed from
the same _Kultur_, the same Fatherland?

They do; and nothing in the whole story of mankind is more strange
than the case of Germany--how Germany through generations has been
carefully trained for this wild s