The Terrible Harvest Of War
1945 a young German girl cries in the ruins of a bombed out building after losing her entire family
“It is not a matter of the cities alone, but of the whole body of French peasantry. Legoyt, in his study of “the alleged degeneration of the French people,” tells us that “it will take long periods of peace and plenty before France can recover the tall statures mowed down in the wars of the republic and the First Empire,” though how plenty can provide for the survival of the tallest this writer does not explain. Peace and plenty may preserve, but they cannot restore. It is claimed, on authority, which I have failed to verify, that the French soldier of today is nearly two inches shorter than the soldier of a century ago…
He says, “in Greece a wealth of spiritual power went down in the suicidal wars.” In Rome “Marius and Cinna slew the aristocrats by hundreds and thousands. Sulla destroyed no less thoroughly the democrats, and whatever of noble blood survived fell as an offering to the proscription of the triumvirate.” “The Romans had less of spontaneous power to lose than the Greeks, and so desolation came to them all the sooner. He who was bold enough to rise politically was almost without exception thrown to the ground. Only cowards remained, and from their brood came forward the new generations. Cowardice showed itself in lack of originality and slavish following of masters and traditions.”
Dr. Zumpt says: “Government, having assumed godhead, took at the same time the appurtenances of it. Officials multiplied. Subjects lost their rights. Abject fear paralyzed the people, and those that ruled were intoxicated with insolence and cruelty.” “The emperor,” says Professor Seeley, “possessed in the army an overwhelming force, over which citizens had no influence, which was totally deaf to reason or eloquence, which had no patriotism because it had no country, which had no humanity because it had no domestic ties.” “There runs through Roman literature a brigand’s and a barbarian’s contempt for honest industry.” “The worst government is that which is most worshipped as divine.” So runs the word of the historian. The elements are not hard to find—extinction of manly blood, extinction of freedom of thought and action, increase of wealth gained by plunder, loss of national existence. So fell Greece and Rome, Carthage and Egypt, the Arabs and the Moors, because, their warriors dying, the nation bred real men no more. The man of the strong arm and the quick eye gave place to the slave, the pariah, the man with the hoe, whose lot changes not with the change of dynasties. Other nations of Europe may furnish illustrations in greater or less degree. Germany guards her men, and reduces the waste of war to a minimum. She is “military, but not warlike;” and this distinction means a great deal from the point of view of this discussion. In modern times the greatest loss of Germany has been not from war, but from emigration.”
-David Starr Jordan, excerpted from “The Blood of the Nation” (1910)