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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
[Letter] 114
But why must peoples have effect on peoples in order to disturb each other's peace? It is said that this is for the sake of progressively growing culture; but what a completely different thing the book of history says!
Did those peoples of the mountains and steppes from northern Asia, the eternal troublemakers of the world, ever have it as their intention, or were they ever in a position, to spread culture? Did not the Chaldaeans precisely put an end to a great part of the ancient majestic glory of western Asia? Attila, so many peoples who preceded or followed after him – did they mean to advance the progressive formation [Fortbildung] of the human species? Did they advance it?
Indeed, the Phoenicians, the Carthaginians with their renowned colonies, the Greeks themselves with their offshoot cities, the Romans with their conquests – did they have this purpose? And if through the friction between peoples there perhaps spread here this art, there that convenience, do these really compensate for the evils which the pressing of the nations upon one another produced for the victor and the vanquished? Who can depict the misery that the Greek and Roman conquests brought indirectly and directly for the circle of the earth that they encompassed?
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