Jacob Gould Schurman

“ Was it not madness for Bulgaria to force war upon Greece, Servia, and Montenegro on the west at a time when Roumania was making demands for territorial compensation on the north and Turkey was sure to seize the occasion to win back territory which Bulgaria had just wrested from her on the south? Never was a government blinder to the significant facts of a critical situation. All circumstances conspired to prescribe peace as the manifest policy for Bulgaria, yet nearly every step taken by the government was provocative of war. ”

“ Spencer's ultimate identification of Justice with equal freedom is inadequate; for not only in the apportionment of freedom, but in the apportionment of all other benefits and of burdens must Justice be realized. Such perfect Justice cannot exist in a society in which the material means of life and happiness are in large part already appropriated. But the facts need not blind us to the ideal, which, indeed, is gradually conquering the facts. ”

“ Any aggrandizement of the Kingdom of Servia, any enlargement of its territory, any extension to the sea and especially to the Adriatic, any heightening and intensifying of the national consciousness of its people involved some danger to the Dual Monarchy. For besides the Germans who control Austria, and the Hungarians who control Hungary, the Austro-Hungarian Empire embraces many millions of Slavs, and the South Slavs are of the same family and speak practically the same language as the inhabitants of the Kingdom of Servia. ”

“ My hope for the Balkan nations is that they may return to this path from which they were too easily diverted in 1913. They must learn, while asserting each its own interests and advancing each its own welfare, to pay scrupulous regard to the rights and just claims of others and to co-operate wisely for the common good in a spirit of mutual confidence and good will. This high policy, as expedient as it is sound, was to a considerable extent embodied in the leadership of Venizelos and Pashitch and Gueshoff. And where there is a leader with vision the people in the end will follow him. ”

“ The receipt of the natural consequences of an individual's nature, active or quiescent, — wherein Mr. Spencer discovers the essence of Justice, — seems to me neither just nor unjust, neither right nor wrong, neither moral nor immoral. No doubt this process has made the later generations of animals stronger, more cunning, and better adapted to the environment than the earlier generations. And were we aiming at a similar improvement in the breed of man, we might perhaps not be able to do better than let the process of natural selection go on undisturbed. ”

“ The history of the world, which is also the high tribunal of the world, proves that no nation can with impunity ignore the rights of other nations or repudiate the ideal of a common good or defy the rule of righteousness by which political communities achieve it—justice, moderation, and the spirit of hopeful and unwearying conciliation. In their war against Turkey in 1912 the Balkan nations, for the first time in history, laid aside their mutual antagonisms and co-operated in a common cause. ”

“ This volume will make as admirable a text-book for beginners in Ethics as the author's Handbook of Psychology has already approved itself for beginners in Psychology. Professor Murray has the rare capacity for writing good elementary text-books. He knows thoroughly the subjects on which he writes; he is luminous and orderly in his expositions; his style is attractive, and at times it almost glows with literary feeling; and his sense of proportion is so faultless that as a rule he says just what beginners ought to know and leaves unsaid what would only confuse them. ”

“ The culminating cruelty was the tribute of Christian children from ten to twelve years of age who were sent to Constantinople to recruit the corps of janissaries. It is not surprising that for the protection of wives and children and the safeguarding of interests the nobles of Bosnia and the Pomaks of Southeastern Bulgaria embraced the creed of their conquerors; the wonder is that the people as a whole remained true to their Christian faith even at the cost of daily martyrdom from generation to generation. ”

“ The state would then appear, not as a conventional, but a natural institution, in, and through which alone, man can lead a truly human life. It was no doubt formed for the protection of life; but, as Aristotle said, it exists for the improvement of life. Were there a world-state, its end would be the development and perfection of the life of mankind. It was this ultimate goal that Hegel probably had in mind when he defined morality and civilization — Sittlichkeit — as the end of the state. But the national state is the highest political community that has yet been reached. ”

“ If such inequality is needed for the preservation of the state, the need may be recognized without dignifying it with the name of Justice. It may be that free will is an illusion, and that our sense of Justice which demands the requital of desert will disappear along with it. But if so, the new deterministic ideal of Justice is not so likely to be satisfied by the inequalities of natural selection as by the equality heralded in the writings of Bentham and Mill and nowadays demanded by the socialistic reconstructors of society. ”

“ Access to the Aegean was not, however, as serious a matter as access to the Adriatic. Yet the expansion of Servia to the south over the Macedonian territory she had wrested from Turkey, as legalized in the Treaty of Bukarest, nullified the Austro-Hungarian dream of expansion through Novi Bazar and Macedonia to the Aegean and the development from Saloniki as a base of a great and profitable commerce with all the Near and Middle East.
Here were the conditions of a national tragedy. They have developed into a great international war, the greatest and most terrible ever waged on this planet. ”

“ As to the first, the moralization of natural selection, I can only observe that it is altogether illogical to turn a natural fact that is into a moral law that ought to be. We may hope that in some ultimate scheme, though we understand it not, whatever is is right; and that even such a ruthless process as the evolution of animal life by extinction of the less favored forms is not without rational significance. ”

“ And there is one danger-point for which the Great Powers themselves are solely responsible. This, as I have already explained, is Albania. An artificial creation with unnatural boundaries, it is a grave question whether this so-called state can either manage its own affairs or live in peace with its Serb and Greek neighbors. At this moment the Greeks of Epirus (whom the Great Powers have transferred to Albania) are resisting to the death incorporation in a state which outrages their deepest and holiest sentiments of religion, race, nationality, and humane civilization. ”

“ Will not each one's just share be the sum of benefits and evils that result from his nature and conduct? Now in spite of superficial likeness, there is a radical difference between Mr. Spencer's doctrine and the view of Justice held by the generality of mankind. The common view is that the principle of distributive Justice requires, in the absence of interventions due to contract or custom, that persons should be treated according to their deserts. And desert implies the free choice of good or evil the power of doing otherwise at the moment of acting. ”

“ And their destiny is so inextricably entangled with the ambitions of some of the Great Powers that the experiment stands no chance of getting a fair trial. I heartily wish the circumstances were other than they are. For as an American I sympathize with the aspirations of all struggling nationalities to be free and independent. And my interest in Albania is deepened, as the interest of all Americans must be deepened, by the fact that a large number of Albanians have now found a home in the United States. ”

“ So far from receiving the benefits and evils of its own nature, a member of a species may occasionally be sacrificed for the prosperity and preservation of the entire species.
Human Justice has no other elements than those constituting sub-human justice. The law of the survival of the fittest holds of man as of all inferior creatures. The individuals best adapted to the environment prosper most; the individuals least adapted prosper least. ”

“ How are we to determine the racial complexion of a country in which race is certified by religion, in which religion is measured by the number of bishops and churches and schools, in which bishops and churches and schools are created and maintained by a propaganda conducted by competing external powers, and in which the results of the propaganda are determined largely by money and men sent from Sofia, Athens, and Belgrade, subject always to the caprice and manipulation of the Sultan's government at Constantinople? ”

“ Writers on ethics, politics, and social science, are fond of describing society as an organism; nor is this unnatural, for biology is the dominant science of the day, as physics was in the eighteenth century. But the metaphor of the organism, though juster, is scarcely less misleading than the metaphor of the machine; and Dr. Taylor goes to the root of the matter when he asserts that "the essence of a state is to be a community which is formally, consciously, freely organized, — which therefore has passed beyond the stage of a mere organism into that of an organization ”