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Proceedings of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. [Sess* 
living force among civilised communities, only so long as your present and 
prospective food supplies hold out. For, after all, the essential problem of 
your social existence is how to provide food for an ever-increasing population. 
Whenever these necessaries of life become inadequate to meet the demands 
of the inhabitants of this globe, then your boasted civilisation comes to the 
end of its tether, and the only solution of the crisis will be a recurrence to 
the cosmic law of the survival of the fittest.” ( The Times , September 12, 
1903. See also Proceedings of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, vol. xxv, 
p. 125.) 
This outburst of prophetic pessimism was at the time regarded by 
current critics as an imaginative and far-fetched improbability. Who 
would have then thought that, in little more than a decade, one of the 
most scientific, cultured, and domesticated people in Europe would so 
unexpectedly adopt some of the worst phases of primitive barbarism in 
their ruling conduct towards their unoffending and helpless fellow- 
creatures ? Nor was this action the result of a sudden impulse of 
revenge for oppressive conduct on the part of any of their neighbours. 
On the contrary, it seems to have been a deliberate policy, founded by 
the rulers of Germany with far-reaching foresight and secretly worked 
out for more than a decade. 
Human Civilisation and German Military “ Kultur.” 
In the code of savagery, under the name of Kultur, which has guided 
the conduct of the German soldiers in the present European war, with the 
approval of the Kaiser and his military authorities, it is maintained that in 
war the end justifies the means. Officers and men are taught the doctrine 
of “ frightfulness ” with all its associated horrors. Passenger and even 
hospital ships, with their living freight of helpless men, women, and 
children, are suddenly and without warning sent to watery graves by 
skilled sailors concealed in submarines in the wide ocean. Innocent 
non-combatants are bullied, beaten, and put to death ; houses robbed 
and demolished ; villages burnt to the ground ; churches desecrated ; 
and historic works of art destroyed — all by way of reprisals on the 
plea that their country is blockaded, or that some obscure civilian had 
fired on their soldiers, or given intelligence to the enemy, as if such 
acts, even if they were true, justified wholesale murders of innocent 
people. 
This revolting violation of the recognised rules of civilised warfare 
among the great nations of the world was, in the first place, deliberately 
