these countries produced at least a
score of authors whose names are known throughout the world. Even
sparsely settled Scandinavia brought forth a triumvirate, Bjoernsen,
Ibsen, and Brandes, without compeers in Germany. And from Russia the
fame of Turgenef and of Tolstoy spread abroad a knowledge of the heart
and mind of a great people who are denounced by Germans as barbarous.

It is probably in the field of science, pure and applied, that the
defenders of the supremacy of German culture would take their last
stand. That the German contribution to science has been important is
indisputable; yet it is equally indisputable that the two dominating
scientific leaders of the second half of the nineteenth century are
Darwin and Pasteur. It is in chemistry that the Germans have been
pioneers; yet the greatest of modern chemists is Mendeleef. It was Hertz
who made the discovery which is the foundation of Marconi's invention;
but although not a few valuable discoveries are to be credited to the
Germans, perhaps almost as many as to either the French or the British,
the German contribution in the field of invention, in the practical
application of scientific discovery, has been less than that of France,
less than that of Great Britain, and less than that of the United
States. The Germans contributed little or nothing to the development of
the railroad, the steamboat, the automobile, the aeroplane, the
telegraph, the telephone, the phonograph, the photograph, the moving
picture, the electric light, the sewing machine, and the reaper and
binder. Even those dread instruments of war, the revolver and the
machine gun, the turreted ship, the torpedo, and the submarine, are not
due to the military ardor of the Germans. It would seem as though the
Germans had been lacking in the inventiveness which is so marked a
feature of our modern civilization.

In this inquiry there has been no desire to deny the value of the German
contributions to the arts and to the sciences. These contributions are
known to all; they speak for themselves; they redound to the honor of
German culture; and for them, whatever may be their number, the other
nations of the world are eternally indebted to Germany. But these German
contributions are neither important enough nor numerous enough to
justify the assumption that German culture is superior or that Germany
is entitled to think herself the supreme leader of the arts and of the
sciences. No one nation can clai