Proud Tower - Barbara W. Tuchman [160]
Such sentiments were among the indirect results of the most fateful voyage since Columbus—Charles Darwin’s aboard the Beagle. Darwin’s findings in The Origin of Species, when applied to human society, supplied the philosophical basis for the theory that war was both inherent in nature and ennobling. War was a conflict in which the stronger and superior race survived, thus advancing civilization. Germany’s thinkers, historians, political and military scientists, working upon the theory with the industry of moles and the tenacity of bulldogs, raised it to a level of national dogma. Houston Stewart Chamberlain, Wagner’s son-in-law, supplied a racial justification in his Foundations of the Nineteenth Century, published in German, which showed that Aryans, being superior in body and soul to other men, had a right to be masters of the earth. Treitschke explained that war, by purifying and unifying a great people, was the source of patriotism. By invigorating them it was a source of strength. Peace was stagnant and decadent and the hope of perpetual peace was not only “impossible but immoral as well.” War as ennobling became by extension, in the words of Generals von der Goltz and Bernhardi, a necessity. It was the right and duty of the nobler, stronger, superior race to extend its rule over inferior peoples, which, in the German view, meant over the world. To other nations it meant over colonies. Darwinism became the White Man’s Burden. Imperialism acquired a moral imperative.
Darwin’s indirect effects reached apotheosis in Captain Mahan. “Honest collision” between nations was “evidently a law of progress,” he wrote in one of a series of articles in 1897–99 in which he tried to instruct Americans in their destiny. This one was called “The Moral Aspect of War.” In another, “A Twentieth Century Outlook,” he wrote that nothing was “more ominous for the future of our race” than the current vociferous tendency “which refuses to recognize in the profession of arms—in war” the source of “heroic ideal.” In a private letter he wrote, “No greater misfortune could well happen than that civilized nations should abandon their preparations for war and take to arbitration.” His thesis was that power, force, and ultimately war were the factors that decide great issues in a nation’s fate and that to depend on anything else, such as arbitration, was an illusion. If arbitration were substituted for armies and navies, European civilization “might not survive, having lost its fighting energy.” Yet Mahan believed the Twentieth Century would reveal that man’s conscience was improving. He could not have preached power so positively if he had not believed equally in progress. His moral rectitude shines in a photograph taken with his wife and two adult daughters. Four pairs of forthright eyes gaze straight at the camera. Four keel-straight noses, four firm mouths, the ladies’ high-necked blouses fastened with bar pin at the throat, the hats perched stiffly on high-piled hair, all express the person “assured of certain certainties,” a species soon to be as extinct as Ribblesdale.
The necessity of struggle was voiced by many spokesmen in many guises: in Henri Bergson’s élan vital, in Shaw’s Life Force, in the strange magic jumble of Nietzsche which was then spreading its fascination over Europe. Nietzsche recognized the waning of religion as a primary force in people’s lives and flung his challenge in three words: “God is dead.” He would have substituted Superman, but ordinary people substituted patriotism. As faith in God retreated before the advance of science, love of country began to fill the empty spaces in the heart. Nationalism absorbed the strength once belonging to religion. Where people formerly fought for religion now they would presumably do no less for its successor. A sense of gathering conflict filled the air. Yeats, living in Paris in 1895, awoke one morning from a vision of apocalypse:
… Unknown spears
Suddenly hurtle before my dream awakened eyes,
And then the clash of