220 THE TREND OF THE RACE 



opportunity presents itself of offering them a double area in the 

 'Kingdom' of Poland." And the author quotes with approval a 

 statement of Sontag {Archiv fur innere Kolonization, 7, H. 5) 

 "If the German empire needs new land adapted for settlement 

 in order not to let its people stifle for want of room and in order 

 greatly to increase the strength of its rural population, then 

 indeed must we take this land if a war which we are compelled to 

 enter upon offers us the opportunity. But — and this must be the 

 foremost consideration in the matter — new land must be made 

 free from a population which would detract from our national 

 and poHtical character, and which would only add new trouble to 

 the difficulties already present in our eastern and western boun- 

 daries, and above all also the danger of a racial deterioration of 

 the mass of our own people." 



Victory, according to Holle and Sontag, must not be allowed 

 to become sterile from the viewpoint of extending the race of the 

 conquerors. The much fostered persuasion of racial superiority 

 which appeals so powerfully to the German mind would have had 

 in the event of victory no small share in determining the policy of 

 the Germans in dealing with the peoples over whom they were 

 victors. Other peoples are not to be regarded as having rights to 

 be respected, but as so much human material of an inferior sort 

 who, in the interests of biological evolution, should be supplanted 

 by the superior blood of the Teutonic race. "A nation," says 

 Klaus Wagner, "even when her national and fundamental inter- 

 ests do not coincide with those of another nation, still must rudely 

 destroy this people's highest interests, must indeed remorselessly 

 cut off from this foreign people the means of living for the future. 

 It is a great powerful nation which overturns a less courageous 

 and degenerate people and takes its territory from it. . . . The 

 great nation needs new territory. Therefore it must spread out 

 over foreign soil, and must displace strangers with the power of 

 the sword." 



We have lived past the day when war is waged as "a grand 

 pastime." 



