The German leaders are feverishly longing and working for an end of this war. They see more danger from within than from the outside. The Allies have declared that they do not expect to destroy or dismember Germany but the little people of Germany have not said what they will or will not do. They will not do anything if an end of the war can be made soon with some positive gain to be shown, or apparently shown, from it. But there is no telling what they will do otherwise, do, that is, to the men who have sacrificed them in vain.
But they are a long-suffering people, and a philosophizing people who have been taught that they are the race chosen of God and Nature, and that the inevitable course of natural evolution is carrying them on to be the Super-race of all earth. This philosophy will go a long way with them, and whether all the shrewd, calculating, self-seeking men of the Court and the General Staff believe it or not, it is a most useful philosophy for them. It puts all those who do believe it in their hands. And as I have said, many Germans do believe it. That is the great danger of the world from the Germans; so many of them believe what they say.
A generation with every nerve strained by the war will probably have little patience with a statement that the generation whose activities began soon after the middle of the last century, went through a conflict of perhaps equal importance, but such is the fact.
Like the present conflict, that was one between an old and firmly rooted principle that had outlived most of its usefulness and was fettering liberty, and a new principle that meant emancipation.
The contest was between the superstition (it was not consistent enough to justify calling it an opinion) on the one hand that man has fallen from a condition of primitive perfection to one of degradation, and on the other hand, the scientific demonstration that man's experience has been one of virtually constant progress, up from protoplasm and probably from inorganic matter. On the former view hung the mass of putrescent and pestilent dogma that had fastened itself upon the sweet and simple teachings of Christ.
The conflict was probably the greatest of all between truth and superstition. The temper of it was perhaps most strikingly illustrated when, at the meeting of the British Association in 1860, Bishop Wilberforce asked Huxley whether it was "through his grandfather or his grandmother that he claimed descent from a monkey," and Huxley answered: