We have all worshiped at the shrine of material achievement--in America with the riot of young strength. England, like old King Amfortas, is now bleeding from the sins of her youth and calling in vain for some Parsifal to deliver her from their penalty. She has built her rich civilization on a morass of exploited millions, and her Nemesis is that in her hour of peril her sodden millions strike and drink and feel no imperative urge to give their lives for an England that sucked her prosperity from their veins. In the race for commercial supremacy the Latin nations--Italy, Spain, and France--have been deemed inferior to Germany, England, and the United States, because they were less tainted with the lust of possession, less materialistic in their reading of life, less powerful in their grasp upon economic opportunity than their rivals. In the Latin countries industry yet remains largely on the small scale, which is economically wasteful, but which does not build up fabulous wealth at the expense of the individual worker. The great corporation designed for the rapid creation of wealth has not found that congenial home on Latin soil which it has on ours, or on German soil. And this fact accounts for the touch of handicraft lingering in the product of Latin industry, for the strength and health individually of their working classes, for their fervor of devotion to the national tradition. The Latin has never forgotten the claims of the individual life: democracy to him is more than the right to vote. Therefore, pure art, pure science, pure literature--also the world of ideas--has a larger part in the life of Latin peoples than with us in the eternal struggle with the materialistic forces of life. To the Latin living is not solely the gratification of the body. He reckons on the intelligence and the spirit of man as well.
It may seem to some that throughout these pages I have spoken paradoxically of the world war as primarily a struggle between the Latin and the Germanic ideal, ignoring the significance of Russia and of England. In spite of the heroic resistance of the French and the pertinacious thrust of the Italians against the steel wall in which Austria has bound them, the Latin forces engaged are obviously less than half of the Allied Powers. On the sea England is virtually alone. Nevertheless, I see the struggle as a Latin-German one, the great decision as essentially a decision between these two types of ideals. All else is relative and accidental. Apart from the surprising vitality developed by the two Latin peoples, their astonishing force in the brutal struggle for survival,--which has disagreeably put wrong the calculations of their enemy,--it is the mental and spiritual leadership of the world which is being fought for rather than the physical. The ideas and the ideals under which the Allies are fighting, which can be simply summed up however divergent their manifestations, are French, are Latin ideas and ideals, not English, not Russian. The spirit of the cause to which England has lent her imperial supremacy and Russia her undeveloped strength is Latin, and since the war began the English have widely borne testimony to this fact.