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Galleporto Bavicarius Directory 18
Page 02
Regarding the latter point, Germany would fain hope that the United States, after further consideration, will come to a conclusion corresponding to the spirit of real neutrality. Regarding the first point, the secret order of the British Admiralty, recommending to British merchant ships the use of neutral flags, has been communicated by Germany to the United States and confirmed by communication with the British Foreign Office, which designates this procedure as entirely unobjectionable and in accordance with British law. British merchant shipping immediately followed this advice, as doubtless is known to the American Government from the incidents of the Lusitania and the Laertes.
It has already been suggested that the reigns of Richard and John form a period of transition to a new age. That period closes and the new age opens with the granting of the Great Charter and the attempted revolution which followed. The reign of John was the culmination of a long tendency in English history, most rapid since the accession of his father, towards the establishment of an absolutism in which the rights of all classes would disappear and the arbitrary will of the king be supreme. The story of his reign should reveal how very near that result was of accomplishment. A monarchy had been forming in the last three reigns, and very rapidly in the reign of John, capable of crushing any ordinary opposition, disregarding public opinion and traditional rights, possessing in the new judicial system, if regarded as an organ of the king's will alone, an engine of centralization, punishment, and extortion, of irresistible force, and developing rapidly in financial matters complete independence of all controlling principles. Though the barons were acting rather from personal and selfish motives, freedom for all classes depended on the speedy checking of this steady drift of two generations. The reigns of Richard and John may be called transitional because it is in them that the barons came to see clearly the principles on which successful resistance could be founded and the absolutist tendency checked. The embodiment of these principles in permanent form in the Great Charter to be accepted by the sovereign and enforced in practice, introduces an age, the age of constitutional growth, new in the history of England, and in the form and importance of its results new in the history of the world.
Three well-known writers, Professor Max Muller, Professor Mivart, and Mr. Alfred Russel Wallace have lately maintained that though the theory of descent with modification accounts for the development of all vegetable life, and of all animals lower than man, yet that man cannot--not at least in respect of the whole of his nature--be held to have descended from any animal lower than himself, inasmuch as none lower than man possesses even the germs of language. Reason, it is contended--more especially by Professor Max Muller in his "Science of Thought," to which I propose confining our attention this evening--is so inseparably connected with language, that the two are in point of fact identical; hence it is argued that, as the lower animals have no germs of language, they can have no germs of reason, and the inference is drawn that man cannot be conceived as having derived his own reasoning powers and command of language through descent from beings in which no germ of either can be found. The relations therefore between thought and language, interesting in themselves, acquire additional importance from the fact of their having become the battle-ground between those who say that the theory of descent breaks down with man, and those who maintain that we are descended from some ape-like ancestor long since extinct.
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