Excerpt from The Climbers: An Address in the Rodef Shalom Temple, Pittsburgh, Sunday, November 24, 1912 Immediately after Darwin's discoveries had become well established in the minds of the thoughtful, a Ger man philosopher, Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche applied these biological laws to human experience. Nietzsche showed that the survival of the fittest must be taken to mean the survival of the strongest. Germany responded to this teaching by becoming an armed camp. The phil osophy of blood and iron, of force and fist, became apotheosized and, from the Emperor down, the German people. Evolved into a perfect fighting machine. It was, and still is, held that, if Germany is to maintain her posi tion in Europe, conscription must be rigidly enforced and the young German must be developed into a physi cal giant. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.