In the silence of the avenue, the Russian evoked the ruddy figures of the implacable gods, that were going to awake that night upon hearing the hum of arms and smelling the acrid odor of blood.  Thor, the brutal god with the little head, was stretching his biceps and clutching the hammer that crushed cities.  Wotan was sharpening his lance which had the lightning for its handle, the thunder for its blade.  Odin, the one-eyed, was gaping with gluttony on the mountain-tops, awaiting the dead warriors that would crowd around his throne.  The dishevelled Valkyries, fat and perspiring, were beginning to gallop from cloud to cloud, hallooing to humanity that they might carry off the corpses doubled like saddle bags, over the haunches of their flying nags.

“German religiosity,” continued the Russian, “is the disavowal of Christianity.  In its eyes, men are no longer equal before God.  Their God is interested only in the strong, and favors them with his support so that they may dare anything.  Those born weak must either submit or disappear.  Neither are nations equal, but are divided into leaders and inferior races whose destiny is to be sifted out and absorbed by their superiors.  Since God has thus ordained, it is unnecessary to state that the grand world-leader is Germany.”

Argensola here interrupted to observe that German pride believed itself championed not only by God but by science, too.

“I know that,” interposed the Russian without letting him finish—­“generalization, inequality, selection, the struggle for life, and all that. . . .  The Germans, so conceited about their special worth, erect upon distant ground their intellectual monuments, borrowing of the foreigner their foundation material whenever they undertake a new line of work.  A Frenchman and an Englishman, Gobineau and Chamberlain, have given them the arguments with which to defend the superiority of their race.  With the rubbish left over from Darwin and Spencer, their old Haeckel has built up his doctrine of ‘Monism’ which, applied to politics, scientifically consecrates Prussian pride and recognizes its right to rule the world by force.”

“No, a thousand times no!” he exclaimed after a brief silence.  “The struggle for existence with its procession of cruelties may be true among the lower species, but it should not be true among human creatures.  We are rational beings and ought to free ourselves from the fatality of environment, moulding it to our convenience.  The animal does not know law, justice or compassion; he lives enslaved in the obscurity of his instincts.  We think, and thought signifies liberty.  Force does not necessarily have to be cruel; it is strongest when it does not take advantage of its power, and is kindly.  All have a right to the life into which they are born, and since among individuals there exist the haughty and the humble, the mighty and the weak, so should exist nations, large and small, old and young.  The end of our existence is not combat nor killing in order that others may afterwards kill us, and, perhaps, be killed themselves.  Civilized peoples ought unanimously to adopt the idea of southern Europe, striving for the most peaceful and sweetest form of life possible.”