Pine Bluff daily graphic., 1918-04-28

the world war at all!
 Do the people of Germany, and those of the Teutonic alliance generally, sympathize with the aims and pur- poses of the German government? Or are they simply lowing to conditions they are unable to mend-yielding un- willing assent to war they would not wage if they could have their way?
 What really caused the war? When may the world hope for it's ending?
 All these and hundreds of other kin dred questions have been answered, and are daily being answered, ln a dozen different ways. For the most part, the answers are based upon su- perficial and very partial aspects Of the matter, and are, necessarily, only partly satisfactory and partly true.
 If we would really understand the significance of the world war we must delve among certain musty manu- scripts that lie mouldering in the li- braries of the German universities. We must read what the masters of the Germanic philosophy have written. We must learn what the Teutonic mind has been taught-what it has been thinking, in what it has been believ- ing-and the reasons and the prin- ciples upon which it has based its be- lief We must get the mental setting of Germany past; for only in the light of this shall we be able to actually comprehend the mental phenomena ~I ho o otc of the Germany of the present.
 Regardless of any sympathy, or lack of sympathy, that may exist between the German government and the Ger man people-whether the blame for the war, and in particular for its un- Hohenzollern caste alone or upon the whole mass of the people of Germany it is to the philosophy of Germany that we must look for the real cause of this bloody iniQuity. For, mediately or immediately, Germany has been made the bloody instrument of false philosophy-a philosophy that bloomed in the blatant blasphemies of Nietzsche and fruited upon the blood. soaked fields of France and Belgium and Servia and Roumania and Meso- potamia and Russia.
 This is philosophy that comments U-boat outrages against undefended, neutral merchantmen and passenger ships upon the high seas: that gloats over the mangled forms of little chil- dren slain in Zeppelin raids upon non- combatants; that honors the Judas ambassadors who stir up sedition and plot against the neutral nations to which they have been accredited-un- less they commit the unpardonable of fense of failing to obliterate complete ly the evidences of their duplicity.
 It would be interesting, If space per mitted, to go far back and trace the development of this fearful philosophy and to identify the channels through which it has been transmitted from great antiquity. For 1t had its roots many centuries ago and Is not prod. uct. merely, of the present age. That it found friendly environment among the Teutonic peoples. and particularly
  turies ago, no one who reads history with an unbiased mind will attempt to deny
 But we must be content with men, tioning only two or three philosophers of comparatively recent times. These are cited, not so much for what they originated as because they gathered into definite and transmissible form so many of these iconoclastic doctrines which, maturing slowly beneath the surface of German thought, were des tined to find their ultimate expression in the writings of Frederick Nietzsche
 Iniquity knows no fatherland. Hence 1t need cause no surprise that one of the most potent factors in shaping the Germanic philosophy was not of Ger man origin. In Niccolo Machiavelh, an Italian courier of the Renaissance, appeared the unblushing champion of such brazen intrigue as startled even the most interruptions diplomats of his day. It required the mellowing in fluence of century or two, combined with the vanishing imparted by inter- preters more or less removed. to so far soften his pernicious teachings as 10 make them acceptable to any but an avowedly unprincipled people. Yet Machiavelli's precepts, so softened un- questionably went far toward prepar- ing German soil for the more virile sowing of Nietzsche. They tended a. least. to break down lingering scrupu lousness and to breed contempt for the moral law.
 In Schopenhauer Nietzsche found his earliest master; and, although he parted from him later on. it is to Echopenhauer, principally, that he owes his characteristic doctrine of the Will to Power. In Schopenhaur, it is true, this was merely the Will to Live. Nietzsche carried that doctrine to it's logical conclusion-if the Machiavel- lian influence is properly taken into consideration,
 Schopenhauer perceived that the Will io Live caused evil as we'll as good