n the North. It is very certain that man
originated north of the equator. I think that one need not expect that
the achievements of man in Australia, or in South America, will rival
the achievements of man nearer the magnetic pole of the earth.

VII. DARWINISM AND THE WAR

That Darwinism was indirectly one of the causes of the World War seems
to me quite obvious. Unwittingly the great and gentle naturalist has
more to answer for than he ever dreamed of. His biological doctrine of
the struggle for existence, natural selection, and the survival of the
fittest, fairly intoxicated the Germans from the first. These theories
fell in well with their militarism and their natural cruelty and
greediness. Their philosophers took them up eagerly. Weissmann fairly
made a god of natural selection, as did other German thinkers. And when
they were ready for war, the Germans at once applied the law of the
jungle to human affairs. The great law of evolution, the triumph of the
strong, the supremacy of the fit, became the foundation of their
political and national ideals. They looked for no higher proof of the
divinity of this law, as applied to races and nations, than the fact
that the organic world had reached its present stage of development
through the operation of this law. Darwin had given currency to these
ideas. He had denied that there was any inherent tendency to
development, affirming that we lived in a world of chance, and that
power comes only to him who exerts power--half truths, all of them.

The Germans as a people have never been born again into the light of our
higher civilization. They are morally blind and politically treacherous.
Their biological condition is that of the lower orders, and the
Darwinian law of progress came to them as an inspiration. Darwin's mind,
in its absence of the higher vision, was akin to a German mind. In his
plodding patience, his devotion to details, and in many other ways, his
mind was German. But in his candor, his truthfulness, his humility, his
simplicity, he was anything but German. Undoubtedly his teachings bore
fruit of a political and semi-political character in the Teutonic mind.
The Teutons incorporated the law of the jungle in their ethical code.
Had not they the same right to expansion and to the usurpation of the
territory and to the treasures of their neighbors that every weed in the
fields and even the vermin of the soil and the air have? If they had the
sanction of natura