Although great States
are stronger and more populous, their peoples are not necessarily more
gifted, and the extinction of the minor languages and types would be a
misfortune for the world's future development.
We may not be able to arrest the forces which seem to be making for that
extinction, but we certainly ought not strengthen them. Rather we ought
to maintain and defend the smaller States and to favor the rise and
growth of new peoples. Not merely because they were delivered from the
tyranny of Sultans like Abdul Hamid did the intellect of Europe welcome
the successively won liberations of Greece, Servia, Bulgaria, and
Montenegro; it was also in the hope that those countries would in time
develop out of their present crude conditions new types of culture, new
centres of productive intellectual life.
Gen. von Bernhardi invokes history as the ultimate court of appeal. He
appeals to Caesar; to Caesar let him go. "Die Weltgeschichte ist das
Weltgericht", ("World history is world tribunal.") History declares that
no nation, however great, is entitled to try to impose its type of
civilization on others. No race, not even the Teutonic or Anglo-Saxon,
is entitled to claim the leadership of humanity. Each people has in its
time contributed something that was distinctively its own, and the world
is far richer thereby than if any one race, however gifted, had
established its permanent ascendency.
Pages:
412
413
414
415
416
417
418
419
420
421
422
423
424
425
426
427
428
429
430
431
432
433
434
435
436