The World Decision | Page 9

theory, the modern Teutonic state, is based on the
belief: "Thou shalt covet, and the race that covets most and by power
gets most, that race shall survive!" And here is the central knot of the
whole dark tangle. The German coveting greater economic
opportunities, knowing himself strong to survive, believes in his divine
right to possess. It is conscious Darwinism--the survival of the fittest,
materially, which he is applying to the world--Darwinism accelerated
by an intelligent will. And the non-Germanic world--the Latin world,
for it is a Latin world in varying degrees of saturation outside of
Germany--rejects the theory and the practice with loathing--when it
sees what it means.
* * * * *
What makes for the happiness of a nation? I asked myself in the
mellow silence of ancient Rome. Is it true that economic conquest
makes for strength, happiness, survival for the nation or for the
individual?
This Italy has always been poor, at least within modern memory--a
literal, actual poverty when often there has not been enough to eat in
the family pot to go around. She has had a difficult time in the
economic race for bread and butter for her children. There is neither
sufficient land easily cultivable nor manufacturing resources to make
her rich, to support her growing population according to the modern
standards of comfort. The Germans despise the Italians for their little
having.
Yet the Italian peasant--man, woman, or child--is a strong human being,
inured to meager living and hardship, loving the soil from which he
digs his living with an intense, fiery love. And poverty has not killed
the joy of living in the Italian. Far from it! In spite of the exceedingly
laborious lives which the majority lead, the privations in food, clothing,
housing, the narrowness,--in the modern view,--of their lives, no one

could consider the Italian people unhappy. Their characters, like their
hillside farms, are the result of an intensive cultivation--of making the
most out of very little naturally given.
A healthy, high-tempered, vital people these, not to be despised in the
kaiserliche fashion even as soldiers. Surely not as human beings, as a
human society. And their poverty has had much influence in making
the Italians the sturdy people they are to-day. Poverty has some
depressing aspects, but in the main her very lack of economic
opportunity--the want of coal and factories and other sources of
wealth--has kept most of these people close to the soil, where one feels
the majority of any healthy, enduring race should be. Poverty has made
the Italians hard, content with little, and able to wring the most out of
that little. It has cultivated them intensively as a people, just as they
have been forced to cultivate their rock-bound fields foot by foot.
There are qualities in human living more precious than prosperity, and
in these Italians have shared abundantly--beauty, sentiment, tradition,
all that give color and meaning to life. These are the treasures of Latin
civilization in behalf of which the allied nations of Europe are now
fighting....
* * * * *
I am well enough aware that all this is contrary to the premises of the
economic and social polity that controls modern statecraft. I know that
our great nations, notably Germany, are based on exactly the opposite
premise--that the strength of a state depends on the economic
development of its people, on its wealth-producing power. Germany
has been the most convinced, the most conscious, the most relentless
exponent of the pernicious belief that the ultimate welfare of the state
depends primarily on the wealth-getting power of its citizens. She has
exalted an economic theory into a religion of nationality with mystical
appeals. She has taught her children to go singing into the jaws of death
in order that the Fatherland may extend her markets and thus enrich her
citizens at the expense of the citizens of other states, who are her
inferiors in the science of slaughter. A queer religion, and all the more
abhorrent when dressed out with the phrases of Christianity!

All modern states are more or less tainted with the same
delusion--ourselves most, perhaps, after Germany. "We have all
sinned," as an eminent Frenchman said, "your people and mine, as well
as England and Germany." It is time to revise some of the fundamental
assumptions of political philosophers and statesmen. Let us admit that
peoples may be strong and happy and contented without seeking to
control increasingly those sources of wealth still left undeveloped on
the earth's surface, without cutting one another's throats in an effort for
national expansion. The psychology of states cannot be fundamentally
different from that of the individuals in them. And the happiness of the
individual has never been found to consist wholly, even largely, in his
economic prosperity.
Because the