[Note—­Gen. von Bernhardi’s knowledge of current history may be estimated by the fact that he assumes (1) that trade rivalry makes war probable between Great Britain and the United States; (2) that he believes that the Indian princes and peoples are likely to revolt against Great Britain should she be involved in war, and (3) that he expects her self-governing colonies to take such an opportunity of severing their connection with her.]

The world is already too uniform and is becoming more uniform every day.  A few leading languages, a few forms of civilization, a few types of character, are spreading out from the seven or eight greatest States and extinguishing weaker languages, forms, and types.  Although great States are stronger and more populous, their peoples are not necessarily more gifted, and the extinction of the minor languages and types would be a misfortune for the world’s future development.

We may not be able to arrest the forces which seem to be making for that extinction, but we certainly ought not strengthen them.  Rather we ought to maintain and defend the smaller States and to favor the rise and growth of new peoples.  Not merely because they were delivered from the tyranny of Sultans like Abdul Hamid did the intellect of Europe welcome the successively won liberations of Greece, Servia, Bulgaria, and Montenegro; it was also in the hope that those countries would in time develop out of their present crude conditions new types of culture, new centres of productive intellectual life.

Gen. von Bernhardi invokes history as the ultimate court of appeal.  He appeals to Caesar; to Caesar let him go.  “Die Weltgeschichte ist das Weltgericht”, ("World history is world tribunal.”) History declares that no nation, however great, is entitled to try to impose its type of civilization on others.  No race, not even the Teutonic or Anglo-Saxon, is entitled to claim the leadership of humanity.  Each people has in its time contributed something that was distinctively its own, and the world is far richer thereby than if any one race, however gifted, had established its permanent ascendency.

We of the Anglo-Saxon race do not claim for ourselves, any more than we admit in others, any right to dominate by force or to impose our own type of civilization on less powerful races.  Perhaps we have not that assured conviction of its superiority which the school of von Bernhardi expressed for the Teutons of North Germany.  We know how much we owe, even within our own islands, to the Celtic race; and, though we must admit that peoples of Anglo-Saxon stock have, like others, made some mistakes and sometimes abused their strength, let it be remembered what have been the latest acts they have done abroad.

Praises American Altruism.