UNDER THE MAPLES 



the Southern. The flowering of civiUzation is in 

 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 AustraHa, 

 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 evolu- 

 tion, 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 develop- 

 ment through the operation of this law. Darwin 



172 



