MACHINE-MADE HUNS.

Taranaki Daily News, 28 March 1916, Page 2

MACHINE-MADE HUNS.

THE CAUSE OF THEIR INHUMANITY. Lecturing to the Historical Association at University Coirege, London, the other day, on "The Teaching of Imperial History," Sir Charles Lucas (of the Colonial Office) advanced the proposition that German inhumanity was due to their being such a scientific race. Sir Charles defined Imperial history, first, as wholly true English history in opposition to that in which the human factor was minimised or overlookeif. Writers of history should keep in view three elementary facts—tiiat history was the record of peoples; that Great Britain was the only island nation which had made an Empire; aud that science and scientific invention was in a constantly growing degree differentiating modern from ancient and early medieval history. The inhumanity of the Germans in the present war, he went on, had horrified ns all. Was it not connected with the fact that of all people at the present day the Germans were the most dominated by science? They were the nearest approach to human beings converted into machinery. The science of flying, still only in its infancy, was robbing England of its advantage of being an island. Could anyone contend that the influence of scientific invention on English history had ever been put into the right place? Like the Empire, it had been relegated to special chapters or sections, ft had never been treated as a central, integral, omnipotent force in shaping the lives and fortunes of nations. Democracy was a direct result of scientific inventions. Printing, railways, telegraphs, bicycles made democracy inevitable. It was not Acts of Parliament that worked the change.