The moral revulsion of the world against the Germans is justified by their use of science.
It is not a question of the excellence, amount, or character of science—all subjects of legitimate debate—but of the use the Germans make of science. While science has been used in war at all times and has been a formidable arm in the hands of those who have known how to use it, still the limits of its use have been fixed with more or less rigor. Even before the conventions of The Hague were formulated, there was the general recognition of the natural distinction between civilized and barbarous warfare. The savage's poisoned arrow has been the symbol of what, though scientific, was barbarous. The murder of the wounded soldier or of the disarmed prisoner has always been condemned as the crime of the apache, not the method of the gentleman. Pity for the innocent—women, children, even the animals—and merciful treatment of the helpless—the drowning, the famished—seem to mark man, even in the profession of intentional killing of his fellow-man, as moved by a certain sentiment, a certain sense of human superiority to the brute which takes blood simply from the love of it.
Even against the legitimate foe there are certain means of offense so base—the use of poison in wells, the diffusion of microbes of disease—or so treacherous—the dynamite-loaded cigar—that the chivalrous man redresses himself at the thought of them with a shudder of mingled moral contempt and physical nausea.
This has been the use made of science by the Germans. They have abolished the distinction between the knight and the brute, between the man and the snake, between pure science and foul practice. This damns the German race.
Our grandchildren will say to their grandchildren: "You murdered people in open boats, you bombarded audiences kneeling in churches, you torpedoed hospital ships in plain ocean, you sent young girls into immoral slavery, you tortured prisoners, you poisoned the wells used by civilian populations, you did a hundred treacherous things that our fathers and mothers shuddered to recall. You Germans did it."
To future generations this will damn the German race. No theory of the super-man, of the chosen state, of the alliance with God will ever gloss it over.
Their science may have honored the Germans, but the Germans have dishonored science.
German science has always had the credit of making happy application and practical use of abstract laws and formulas, chemical, physical, biological. In applying science in war, however, it has disallowed the moral laws which underlie all sound science and healthy life. Here German "applied science" will remain, let us hope, for all time unrivalled.
J. MARK BALDWIN.
