The Republican journal., 1914-11-19
Overseas. Germany.

OfSlsoSdSs 1ClllldllH.
To THE EDITOR OF THE JOURNAL:
Fifty years ago Ebenezer Knowlton. late
member of Congress, but then a
preacher at South Montville, preferring
to be such to being Governor of Maine,
broke into righteous wrath one day in the
pulpit over an article in The Progressive
Age of Belfast, entitled 1.-The New Ma
terialism," affirming that he had notified
the publisher that if such articles con-
tinued to run in the paper, he would dis
continue taking 1t. In the said article
the notion was set forth that the actions
and reactions of matter under complex
organization produce the phenomena of
conscious life, emotion and intelligence.
1t was a straight deduction from the
teaching of Herman Ludwig Ferdinand
Helmholtz, the great German physiolo
gist, in his essay on ''The 1nteraction of
Natural Forces" and the sentiment was
developing that it ruled God out of the
universe.
Incidentally, Ebenezer Knowlton, as
the old-timers in Waldo county we'll re-
member, was a man of rare and COM
handing gift of speech, rare graces of
heart, clear and positive in his concep-
lions of ethics and the spiritual side of
existence.
Tacitus, the Roman historian, follow
ing the arms of Caesar into the heart of
the German forests, found the Teutonic
tribes, the Germani, stern in virtues,
severe in their. stand for morals, both
private and public, chasing adulterers
naked through their villages, then sink
ing them in swamps under wicker hur-
dies. ''They had no affairs, no temples.
but worshipped that mysterious exist
ence that seemed to pervade all things"
Emmanuel Kant of Konigsburg century
and half ago clearly set forth the pre-
eminence of mind over matter in his
"Pure Reason" He enjoined duty for
duty's sake, and said 1.-TWO things fill
me with awe: one is the aspect of the
starry heavens; the other is the moral
law within me-" Luther, Mendelssohn,
Goethe, Schiller, Beethoven, galaxy
of great names, glorify the idealistic
annals of "the Fatherland": but all
seem to have been eclipsed by the deep
umbrage of materialism, voiced by
Treitshke, Helmholtz and Bernhard.
Eminent thinkers and publicists here
in America have not hesitated to affirm
that materialism is the direct road to
militarism, commercialism and atheism:
and Joseph Cook, a short tine before he
died, declared he saw in it the crimson
dawning of judgment. He named, how
ever, Herman Lott, as modern German
thinker who might call that people away
from their error; but Herman Lott has
been sidetracked by the Prussian mill
tarists, who, melted by the success of
Count Bismark in welding the Empire
out of Prussia, Bavaria, Saxony, Wur-
temburg, Hesse, and other principalities,
duchies and free cities, and putting Paris
under tribute in III, annexing Alsace and
Lorraine, seem to have brought all classes
of that remarkable people to think that,
having thus forged ahead in half CEN
fury, the worlds destiny is to them
prize, the taking of which as an end JUS
titles any means.
Militarism in the worlds history has
never proved a friend to government of,
for and by the people. Germany, with
sixty-five million people, at the outbreak
of this war, had five million soldiers on a
war footing. Russia, with one hundred
and sixty million people and relatively
much vaster frontier to defend, had six
million soldiers on war footing. The
Germans, who in primitive forest as
semblages gave the Angles and the Sax
ons, migrating into Britain, the first
idea of the town meeting, the germ of
all popular government, are today rest
less and anxious over the straits into
which the militarists have brought them.
Popular will goes for naught. Paternal-
ism seems likely to fail of saving the
masses from sheer h ardship, if not star
walton, before the close of the present
conflict in arms. Had the peoples chosen
representatives passed on the impend-
ing issue before the Bureaucrats acted,
this most shocking world conflict would
not now be raging. In the west the OPP
posing forces have dug themselves into
the ground, reither being able to date to
dislodge the other. Suppose the Germans
should get nearer Dunkirk and Calais, a
storm of shells awaits them from the al
lied fleets, over range of at least five
miles from the sea. Only by the des-