Extracts from Addresses 379
microscopic accuracy within a small field, and its total incapacity to take
the small results thus ascertained and put them into workable systems of
thought.
I think one of the finest illustrations we have had of that fact has
been in the recent war. We have observed the total inability of the
German people to utilize the results of a very elaborate investigation.
The German nation had the most far-flung, most ramified, most ex-
pensive, most remorseless, spy system in the world. They had spies
everywhere, in every country. They knew all the facts about every
people with whom they wanted to do business. The only difficulty was
that they could not use the facts when they got them. They knew all
about Ireland. They knew every horse, every man, every pound of
coal, every bit of ammunition, every resource of Ireland. They knew
perfectly well, or thought they knew, that at the moment when England
was involved in trouble, if she dared to go in on the side of her threatened
Allies, Ireland would stab her in the back. There was only one thing
that Germany could not find out about Ireland, with all the ingenuity
of that exhaustive spy system, and that was that when England forgot
her own safety and took her place by the side of her friends across the
Channel, Ireland not only did not go into the war on the side against
her, but sent her men by the thousands to the front to take their place
under the Union Jack. That was the one little thing that Germany
could not find out about Ireland.
There was one thing Germany could not find out about India. They
had spies in every city of India from Calcutta to Bombay. They knew
perfectly well that India was seething and restless and turbulent ever
since the Sepoy rebellion in 1857, and they said: “If England dares to
go into this conflict, India will rise instantly in revolt against the power
of Great Britain.” There was only one thing they could not find out
about India, and that was that at the time England did go in, forgetting
her Eastern empire, careless, if need be, of all her resources in the Far
East, India not only did not revolt against her, but sent her rajahs and
maharajahs and her tens of thousands of troops, demanding a right to
fight on the western front, and poured her millions of rupees into the
war chest of the mother country. That was the one thing that Germany
could not find out about India. She has a magnificent way of looking
for facts, and finding them, but she cannot use her results. It is perfectly
demonstrable that there is not a great principle in mathematics, in
science, in history, in philosophy, in religion, that has made scholarship
significant during the last hundred years, that has originated in Germany.
We have been passing through this tremendous war. It has been to
us our great experience, our great adventure—to all of us. We were