So much has become involved in the titanic struggle, so many subordinate issues have risen to cloud the one cardinal spiritual issue at stake, that we are likely to forget it or deny that there is any. Is the world to be barbarized again or not?
This reiterated use of the term "barbarism" is not merely rhetorical nor cheap invective. It is exact. One of the Olympian jests of this world tragedy has been the passionate verbal battles over the claims of respective "_Kulturs_" to the favor of survival. Why deny that the barbarian can have a very superior form of "_Kultur_" and yet remain a barbarian in soul? These pages on the German lesson are a tribute to Germany's special contribution to the world. Social and industrial organization, systematic instead of loose ways of doing things, prudence, thrift, obedience and subordination of the individual to the state, discipline--in a word, an efficient society. It is a great lesson! No one to-day can belittle its meaning. Possibly the remote, hidden reason for all this seemingly useless bloody sacrifice in our prosperous modern world is to teach the primary principles of the lesson. God knows that we all need it--we in America most after the Russian, and next to us the English. If the world can learn the lesson which Germany is pounding in with ruin, slaughter, and misery,--can discipline itself without becoming Teutonized,--the sacrifice is not too great. If the non-Germanic peoples cannot learn the lesson sufficiently well, then the Teuton must rule the world with "his old German God." His boasted superiority will become fact, destiny.
That is the momentous decision which is being wrought out these days in Europe with blood and tears--the relative importance to mankind of discipline and liberty. The ideal is to have both, as much of one as is consistent with the other. In this country and in England may be seen the evil of an individualism run into license--the waste, the folly of it. And in Germany may be seen the monstrous result of an idolatrous devotion to the other ideal--the man-made machine without a soul. Between the two lies the fairest road into the future, and that road, with an unerring instinct, the Latin follows.