Disquisition by Scripps, E.W., The vices of the nations, September 2, 1914

              THE VICES OF THE NATIONS
* -
-Suchan event as the present European war is a testing ground,
of all those nations anvolved.
.:l/1.A-The
successes or failures of a nation ~ not always, or 8ven
generally, demonstrated by the outoome of one war- for that matter, by a
series of wars ..
However t the event of a great war throws a great light on
the character- the vices andvirtutes- of the nations involved in it~
The present European war has now been going on for a month,
and already developments have been such as to g~ve an observer a fairly
good ground on whioh to base oalculations as to the future ..
Also, enough has occurred to expose those charaoteristios
, of various nations which may properly be called vices ..
-:FRANCE:-
The vices of this nation might be discoUnted as over-civil­ization..
The people of the nation, as a whole, have progressed too far
away from brutish nature to be able to succeed in a contest where brute
strength and brutish instincts are principally to be relied upon. The
people of Fra:-:cce have well nigh succeeded in invalidating the seoond law
of nature-- the propagation of their species. In warfare numbers count
where everything else is equal, and even where the inequality is not too
: great numbers count. The German birthrate, legitimate ~J.illeg~te, has
been enormous for years. That of France has been so small that there are
fewer full blooded Frenchmen in France today than there were forty years
ago. By full blooded Frenchmen; I mean those who are d~cendAnts of French­men
and women of the last half of the last century. The }:I'rench, as a people,
, arehedonic-- individually, their principal aim has been to seek pleas~e
and to avoid pain. As a people that have turned the virtu/e af thrift--
and foresigh t I.nt 0 a V.l ce. 303
Ohio University Libraries, E.W. Scripps Papers, MSS 117, Series 4, http://bit.ly/scripps_mss117