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Updated: May 29, 2025
The great inheritance of honor, of valor and of all martial virtues is, as Professor Cramb very fitly expresses it, "but ours on trust, the fief inalienable of the dead and of the generation to come," and the summons of the present is to guard this heritage, nor to bate one jot of the ancient spirit; the summons of the future will be so to widen its scope as to apply it in all walks and relations of life.
"Nineteenth Century Europe" was written by Mr. Cramb for the Daily News Special Number for December 31st, 1900. In it he presents a survey of the political events and tendencies throughout Europe during the nineteenth century.
Finally, says Cramb, we see the characteristic thought of the twentieth century in the position that war is bad because it is contrary to social well-being and is economically profitless, alike to the victor and the vanquished.
Once Germany herself was affected by such ideals of history. In the time of Goethe, Cramb reminds us, mankind, culture and humanity were the great words. But upon this love of humanity and culture and love of the homeland a political spirit was engrafted, and this new spirit of Germany has manifestly now led to her downfall.
Cramb says that wars persist in spite of their unreason, because there is something transcendental that supports them, and this transcendental purpose is the desire for empire. Powers says that nations fight for tangible things and also for intangible things.
Cramb says that we can trace in Germany before the war, showing through the transient mists of industrialism and socialism, the vision of the religion of valor which runs through all German history. The craving for a valorous life, for reality, the desire to lose one's own individuality these moods of war are religious or mystic whatever else they may be or contain.
But this vast empire rests no more than did Napoleon's upon an incontestible force, inasmuch as up to this day it was defended only by an army less numerous and less well-equipped than that of many a smaller nation, thus almost inevitably inviting war, as Professor Cramb pointed out a year or two ago in his prophetic book, Germany and England, which has only recently aroused the interest which it deserves.
Cramb tells us that all recent centuries have had their doctrines of pacifism, each century having its own characteristic variety. In the time of the Marlborough wars, there appeared the book of Abbé de St. Pierre denouncing all wars.
Such conditions show, again, the effects of the individualism that prevails national unity and the capacity for free organization without individual or special motives are wanting. Cramb has stated a fundamental truth, from our point of view, in saying that hitherto democracy has been more interested in its rights than in its duties.
Cramb, the English writer, says that it is very easy to demonstrate that the glory of battle is an illusion, but by the same argument you may demonstrate that all glory and life itself is an illusion and a mockery.
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