material civilization. This development among the Germans had been
hastened by the necessities of war and siege, yet it was what the whole
world had been driving toward since man first used a tool and built a
hut. Our own freer civilization of the outer world had been achieved
only by compromises, by a stubborn resistance against the forces to
which we ascribed our progress. We were merely not so completely
civilized, because we had never been wholly domesticated.

As I now record these thoughts on the true significance of the perfected
civilization of the Germans I realize that I was even more right than I
then knew, for the sunless city of Berlin is of a truth a civilization
gone to seed, its people are a domesticated species, they are the
logical outcome of science applied to human affairs, with them the
prodigality and waste of Nature have been eliminated, they have stamped
out contagious diseases of every kind, they have substituted for the
laws of Nature the laws that man may pick by scientific theory and
experiment from the multitude of possibilities. Yes, the Germans were
civilized. And as I pondered these things I recalled those fairy tales
that naturalists tell of the stagnant and fixed society of ants in their
subterranean catacombs. These insect species credited for industry and
intelligence, have in their lesser world reached a similar perfection of
civilization. Ants have a royal house, they have a highly specialized
and fixed system of caste, a completely socialized state--yes, a
Utopia--even as Berlin was a Utopia, with the light of the sun and the
light of the soul, the soul of the wild free man, forever shut out. Yes,
I was walking in Utopia, a nightmare at the end of man's long
dream--Utopia--Black Utopia--City of Endless Night--diabolically
compounded of the three elements of civilization in which the Germans
had always been supreme--imperialism, science and socialism.