Read "The Pentecost of Calamity" by Owen Wister online for free on Textopian. Full text with search, annotations, highlights, and AI-powered reading aids.
The world is in agony. We witness the most terrible catastrophe known to mankind -- most terrible, not from its huge size, but because it is a moral catastrophe. Through centuries of suffering and cruelty, guided by religion, we thought we had attained to knowledge of and belief in a public right between nations, and an honorable warfare, if warfare must be. This has been shattered to pieces. No need to investigate further the atrocities at Liege or Louvain. These and more have indeed been amply proved, but what need of proof after the Lusitania school festival? In that holiday we see the feast of _Kultur_, the Teutonic climax. How came it to pass? Is it the same Germany who gave those two holidays to her school children? The opera in Frankfurt, and this orgy of barbaric blood-lust, guttural with the deep basses of the fathers and shrill with the trebles of their young? Their young, to whom they teach one day the gentle melodies of Lortzing, and to exult in world-assassination on another?
Goethe said -- and the words glow with new prophetic light: "Germans are of yesterday; . a few centuries must still elapse before. it will be said of them, 'It is long since they were barbarians. " And again: "National hatred is a peculiar thing. You will always find it strongest and most violent where there is the lowest degree of _Kultur_. " But how came it to pass? Do the two holidays proceed from the same _Kultur_, the same Fatherland?