142 SECTIONAL ADDRESSES. 1 



of teaching posts had made itself felt long before the war, so that th« 

 number of specialists and of those interested in our science has 

 receded. ' * 

 And again : 



' During the war we have often experienced how in political 

 pamphlets ethnology and ethnography — even as in the peace treaty of 

 Brest-Litovsk — were used too often as catchwords without their users 

 being clear about the ideas those words convey. The sad results of 

 our foreign policy, the collapse of all our calculations as to national 

 frames of mind, were based in no small degree on etlinographic ignor- 

 ance ; oniB has only to take for example the case of the Turks. Ethnology 

 should not embrace only the spears and clubs of the savages, but also 

 the psychology and demography of the white races, the European 

 peoples. At this very moment, when the right of self-determination 

 has become a foremost question of the day, the scientific determination 

 of the boundaries of a people and its lands has become a task of the first 

 importance. But our Government of the past knew nothing of the 

 activity of the ethnologists, and the Universities were not in the condition 

 to come to their aid, for ethnological chairs and institutes were wanting. 

 The foundation of such must be the task of the immediate future. ' * 



And once more : 



' The problems of the military fitness of our people, of the physical 

 constitution of the various social classes, of the influence of the social 

 and material environment upon them, the problems of the biological 

 grounds for the fall in the birth-rate and its results, of the racial com- 

 position of our people, of the eventual racial differences and the accom- 

 panying diverse mental capacities of the individual strata, and finally 

 the racial changes which may take place in a folk under the influences 

 of civilisation, and the bearing of all these matters on the fate of a 

 nation, these are problems which can alone be investigated and brought 

 nearer to solution by anthropology. Even now after the war population- 

 problems stand in the forefront of interest, the question of folk-increase 

 and of the falling birtK-rate is the vital question of the future. ' ^ 



I must ask your pardon for quoting so much, but it seems so strongly 

 to point the moral of my tale. If you will study what Germany is 

 feeling and thinking to-day do not hope to find it in the newspaper 

 reports, seek it elsewhere in personal communication or in German 

 writings. Then, I think, you will agree with me that rightly or wrongly 

 there is a conviction spreading in Germany that the war arose and that 

 the war was lost because a nation of professed thinkers had studied all 

 sciences, but had omitted to study aptly the science of man. And in 

 a certain sense that is an absolutely correct conviction, for if the science 

 of man stood where we may hope it will stand in the dim and distant 

 future, man would from the past and the surrounding present have 

 some grasp of future evolution, and so have a greater chance of guiding 

 its controllable factors. 



5 Correspondenz Blatt, u.s.w., Jahrg. 1., S. 37. 

 « Ibid. S. 41. 

 ^ Ihid. S. 38, 



