VI
Since the paragraphs that make up the foregoing chapter were
written the American academic community has been thrown into a
new and peculiar position by the fortunes of war. The progress
and the further promise of the war hold in prospect new and
untried responsibilities, as well as an unexampled opportunity. So that the outlook now (June 1918) would seem to be that the Americans are to be brought into a central place in the republic of learning; to take a position, not so much of dominance as of trust and guardianship; not so much by virtue of their own superior merit as by force of the insolvency of the European academic community.
Again, it is not that the war is expected to leave the lines
of European scholars and scientists extinct; although there is no
denying the serious inroads made by the war, both in the way of a
high mortality among European men of learning, and in the way of
a decimation of the new men on whom the hopes of the higher
learning for the incoming generation should have rested. There is
also a serious diversion of the young forces from learning to
transiently urgent matters of a more material, and more ephemeral
nature. But possibly more sinister than all these losses that are
in a way amenable to statistical record and estimate, is the
current and prospective loss of morale.
Naturally, it would be difficult and hazardous to offer an
appraisal of this prospective loss of morale, with which it is to
be expected that the disintegrated European community of learned
men will come through the troubled times. But that there is much
to be looked for on this score, that there is much to be written
off in the way of lowered aggregate efficiency and loss of the
spirit of team-work, -- that much there is no denying, and it is
useless to blink the fact.
There has already a good deal of disillusionment taken effect
throughout the nations of Christendom in respect of the temper
and trustworthiness of German scholarship these past three or
four years, and it is fairly beyond computation what further
shift of sentiment in this respect is to be looked for in the
course of a further Possible period of years given over to the
same line of experience. Doubtless, the German scholars, and
therefore the German seats of learning whose creatures and whose
custodians these German scholars are, have earned much of the
distrust and dispraise that is falling to their share. There is
no overlooking the fact that they have proved the frailty of
their hold on those elementary principles of sobriety and single
mind that underlie all sound work in the field of learning. To
any one who has the interest of the higher learning at heart, the
spectacle of maudlin chauvinism and inflated scurrility
unremittingly placed on view by the putative leaders of German
science and scholarship can not but be exceedingly disheartening.
It may be argued, and it may be true, of course, that much of
this failure of intelligence and spiritual force among Germany's
men of learning is of the nature of a transient eclipse of their
powers; that with the return of settled conditions there is due
to come a return of poise and insight. But when all due argument
has been heard, it remains true that the distrust set afoot in
the mind of their neighbours, by this highly remarkable
exhibition of their personal equation, will long inure to the
disability of Germany's men of learning as a force to be counted
on in that teamwork that is of the essence of things for the
advancement of learning. In effect, Germany, and Germany's
associates in this warlike enterprise, will presumably be found
bankrupt in this respect on the return of peace, even beyond the
other nations.