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“Fire away, sir,” said Dick.

Hardman nodded his assent. “I should like very much to hear in what possible way you connect the misconduct of Germany, which I admit, with your idea of the present value of classical study, which I question.”

“In this way,” said the professor earnestly. “Germany has been living for fifty years with a closed mind. Oh, I grant you it was an active mind, scientific, laborious, immensely patient. But it was an ingrowing mind. Sure of its own superiority, it took no counsel with antiquity and scorned the advice of its neighbors. It was intent on producing something entirely new and all its own–a purely German Kultur, independent of the past, and irresponsible to any laws except those of Germany’s interests and needs. Hence it fell into bad habits of thought and feeling, got into trouble, and brought infinite trouble upon the world.”

“And do you claim,” interrupted Hardman, “that this would have been prevented by reading the classics? Would that have been the only and efficient cure for Germany’s disease? Rather a large claim, that!”

“Much too large,” replied the professor. “I did not make it. In the first place, it may be that Germany’s trouble had gone beyond any cure but the knife. In the second place, I regard the intelligent reading of the Bible and the vital apprehension of the real spirit of Christianity as the best of all cures for mental and moral ills. All that I claim for the classics–the works of the greatest of the Greek and Roman writers–is that they have in them a certain remedial and sanitary quality. They contain noble thoughts in noble forms. They show the strength of self-restraint. They breathe the air of clearness and candor. They set forth ideals of character and conduct which are elevating. They also disclose the weakness and the ugliness of things mean and base. They have the broad and generous spirit of the true literae humaniores. They reveal the springs of civilization and lead us–

‘To the glory that was Greece,
To the grandeur that was Rome.’

Now these are precisely the remedies ‘indicated,’ as the physicians say, for the cure, or at least the mitigation, of the specific bad habits which finally caused the madness of Germany.”

“Please tell us, sir,” asked Dick gravely, “how you mean us to take that. Do you really think it would have done any good to those brutes who ravaged Belgium and outraged France to read Tacitus or Virgil or the Greek tragedies? They couldn’t have done it, anyhow.”

“Probably not,” answered the professor, while Hardman sat staring intently into the fire, “probably not. But suppose the leaders and guides of Germany (her masters, in effect, who moulded and kultured the people to serve their nefarious purpose of dominating the world by violence), suppose these masters had really known the meaning and felt the truth of the Greek tragedies, which unveil reckless arrogance–Hybris–as the fatal sin, hateful to the gods and doomed to an inevitable Nemesis. Might not this truth, filtering through the masters to the people, have led them to the abatement of the ruinous pride which sent Germany out to subjugate the other nations in 1914? The egregious General von der Goltz voiced the insane arrogance which made this war when he said, ‘The nineteenth century saw a German Empire, the twentieth shall see a German world.’

“Or suppose the Teutonic teachers and pastors had read with understanding and taken to heart the passages of Csesar in which he curtly describes the violent and thievish qualities of the ancient Germans–how they spread desolation around them to protect their borders, and encouraged their young men in brigandage in order to keep them in practice. Might not these plain lessons have been used as a warning to the people of modern Germany to discourage their predatory propensities and their habits of devastation and to hold them back from their relapse into the Schrecklichkeit of savage warfare? George Meredith says a good thing in ‘Diana of the Crossways’: ‘Before you can civilize a man, you must first de-barbarize him.’ That is the trouble with the Germans, especially their leaders and masters. They have never gotten rid of their fundamental barbarism, the idolatry of might above right.