Quoted By:
The weakling will always be the first
to subject himself. His preservation is generally as little a gain for the victor as the stay at homes are for the
mother country. Not seldom, therefore, the law of action is passed on from the mother country to the colonies,
because there a concentration of the highest human values has taken place in a wholly natural way. However,
the positive gain for the new country is thus a loss for the mother country. As soon as a Folk once loses its best,
strongest and most natural forces through emigration in the course of centuries, it will hardly be able any more
to muster the inner strength to put up the necessary resistance to fate in critical times. It will then sooner grasp
at birth control. Even here the loss in numbers is not decisive, but the terrible fact that, through birth control, the
highest potential values of a Folk are destroyed at the very outset. For the greatness and future of a Folk is
determined through the sum of its capacities for the highest achievements in all fields. But these are personality
values which do not appear linked to primogeniture. If we were to strike off from our German cultural life, from
our science, indeed from our whole existence as such, all that which was created by men who were not first
born sons, then Germany would hardly be a Balkan State. The German Folk would no longer have any claim to
being valued as a cultural Folk. Moreover, it must be considered that, even in the case of those men who as first
born nevertheless accomplished great things for their Folk, it must first be examined whether one of their
ancestors at least had not been a first born. For when in his whole ancestral series the chain of the first born
appears as broken just once [one man], then he also belongs to those who would not have existed had our
forefathers always paid homage to this principle. In the life of nations, however, there are no vices of the past
that are [would be] right in the present.
