intelligible argument. An army endangered by foreigners may do the most
frightful things. But then we turn the next page of the Kaiser's public
diary, and we find him writing to the President of the United States to
complain that the English are using dumdum bullets and violating various
regulations of The Hague Conference. I pass for the present the question
of whether there is a word of truth in these charges. I am content to
gaze rapturously at the blinking eyes of the true, or positive,
barbarian. I suppose he would be quite puzzled if we said that violating
The Hague Conference was "a military necessity" to us; or that the rules
of the conference were only a scrap of paper. He would be quite pained
if we said that dumdum bullets "by their very frightfulness" would be
very useful to keep conquered Germans in order. Do what he will, he
cannot get outside the idea that he, because he is he and not you, is
free to break the law and also to appeal to the law. It is said that the
Prussian officers play at a game called Kriegspiel, or the war game. But
in truth they could not play at any game, for the essence of every game
is that the rules are the same on both sides.
But, taking every German institution in turn, the case is the same; and
it is not a case of mere bloodshed or military bravado. The duel, for
example, can legitimately be called a barbaric thing, but the word is
here used in another sense. There are duels in Germany; but so there are
in France, Italy, Belgium, Spain; indeed, there are duels wherever there
are dentists, newspapers, Turkish baths, time tables, and all the curses
of civilization--except in England and a corner of America. You may
happen to regard the duel as a historic relic of the more barbaric
States on which these modern States were built. It might equally well be
maintained that the duel is everywhere the sign of high civilization,
being the sign of its more delicate sense of honor, its more vulnerable
vanity, or its greater dread of social disrepute. But whichever of the
two views you take, you must concede that the essence of the duel is an
armed equality. I should not, therefore, apply the word barbaric, as I
am using it, to the duels of German officers, or even the broadsword
combats that are conventional among the German students. I do not see
why a young Prussian should not have scars all over his face if he likes
them; nay, they are often the redeeming points of interest on an
otherwise somewhat unenlightening countenance. The duel may be defended;
the sham duel may be defended.
*The One-Sided Prussian Duel.*
What cannot be defended is something really peculiar to Prussia, of
which we hear numberless stories, some of them certainly true. It might
be called the one-sided duel. I mean the idea that there is some sort of
dignity in drawing the sword upon a man who has not got a sword--a
waiter, or a shop assistant, or even a schoolboy. One of the officers of
the Kaiser in the affair at Zabern was found industriously hacking at a
cripple. In all these matters I would avoid sentiment. We must not lose
our tempers at the mere cruelty of the thing, but pursue the strict
psychological distinction. Others besides German soldiers have slain the
defenseless, for loot or lust or private malice, like any other
murderer. The point is that nowhere else but in Prussian Germany is any
theory of honor mixed up with such things, any more than with poisoning
or picking pockets. No French, English, Italian, or American gentleman
would think he had in some way cleared his own character by sticking his
sabre through some ridiculous greengrocer who had nothing in his hand
but a cucumber. It would seem as if the word which is translated from
the German as "honor" must really mean something quite different in
German. It seems to mean something more like what we should call
"prestige."
*Absence of the Reciprocal Idea.*
The fundamental fact, however, is the absence of the reciprocal idea.
The Prussian is not sufficiently civilized for the duel. Even when he
crosses swords with us his thoughts are not as our thoughts; when we
both glorify war we are glorifying different things. Our medals are
wrought like his, but they do not mean the same thing; our regiments are
cheered as his are, but the thought in the heart is not the same; the
Iron Cross is on the bosom of his King, but it is not the sign of our
God. For we, alas! follow our God with many relapses and
self-contradictions, but he follows his very consistently. Through all
the things that we have examined, the view of national boundaries, the
view of military methods, the view of personal honor and self-defense,
there runs in their case something of an atrocious simplicity; something
too simple for us to understand; the idea that glory consists in holding
the steel, and not in facing it.
If further examples were necessary it would be easy to give hundreds of
them. Let us leave, for the moment, the relations between man and man in
the thing called the duel. Let us take the relation between man and
woman, in that immortal duel which we call a marriage. Here again we
shall find that other Christian civilizations aim at some kind of
equality, even if the balance be irrational or dangerous. Thus, the two
extremes of the treatment of women might be represented by what are
called the respectable classes in America and in France. In America they
choose the risk of comradeship, in France the compensation of courtesy.
In America it is practically possible for any young gentleman to take
any young lady for what he calls (I deeply regret to say) a joy ride;
but at least the man goes with the woman as much as the woman with the
man. In France the young woman is protected like a nun while she is
unmarried; but when she is a mother she is really a holy woman; and when
she is a grandmother she is a holy terror.
By both extremes the woman gets something back out of life. There is
only one place where she gets little or nothing back, and that is the
north of Germany. France and America aim alike at equality; America by
similarity, France by dissimilarity. But North Germany does definitely
aim at inequality. The woman stands up with no more irritation than a
butler; the man sits down with no more embarrassment than a guest. This
is the cool affirmation of inferiority, as in the case of the sabre and
the tradesmen. "Thou goest with women; forget not thy whip," said
Nietzsche. It will be observed that he does not say "poker," which might
come more naturally to the mind of a more common or Christian
wife-beater. But, then, a poker is a part of domesticity, and might be
used by the wife as well as the husband. In fact, it often is. The sword
and the whip are the weapons of a privileged caste.
Pass from the closest of all differences, that between husband and wife,
to the most distant of all differences, that of the remote and unrelated
races who have seldom seen each other's faces, and never been tinged
with each other's blood. Here we still find the same unvarying Prussian
principle. Any European might feel a genuine fear of the Yellow Peril,
and many Englishmen, Frenchmen, and Russians have felt and expressed it.
Many might say, and have said, that the heathen Chinee is very heathen
indeed; that if he ever advances against us he will trample and torture
and utterly destroy, in a way that Eastern people do, but Western people
do not. Nor do I doubt the German Emperor's sincerity when he sought to
point out to us how abnormal and abominable such a nightmare campaign
would be, supposing that it could come.
But now comes the comic irony, which never fails to follow on the
attempt of the Prussian to be philosophic. For the Kaiser, after
explaining to his troops how important it was to avoid Eastern
barbarism, instantly commanded them to become Eastern barbarians. He
told them, in so many words, to be Huns, and leave nothing living or
standing behind them. In fact, he frankly offered a new army corps of
aboriginal Tartars to the Far East, within such time as it may take a
bewildered Hanoverian to turn into a Tartar. Any one who has the painful
habit of personal thought will perceive here at once the non-reciprocal
principle again. Boiled down to its bones of logic, it means simply
this: "I am a German and you are a Chinaman. Therefore, I being a
German, have a right to be a Chinaman. But you have no right to be a
Chinaman, because you are only a Chinaman." This is probably the highest
point to which the German culture has risen.
*"The Principle of Being Unprincipled."*
The principle here neglected, which may be called mutuality by those who
misunderstand and dislike the word equality, does not offer so clear a
distinction between the Prussian and the other peoples as did the first
Prussian principle of an infinite and destructive opportunism; or, in
other words, the principle of being unprincipled. Nor upon this second
can one take up so obvious a position touching the other civilizations
or semi-civilizations of the world. Some idea of oath and bond there is
in the rudest tribes, in the darkest continents. But it might be
maintained, of the more delicate and imaginative element of reciprocity,
that a cannibal in Borneo understands it almost as little as a professor
in Berlin. A narrow and one-sided seriousness is the fault of barbarians
all over the world. This may have been the meaning, for aught I know, of
the one eye of the Cyclops; that the barbarian cannot see around things
or look at them from two points of view, and thus becomes a blind beast
and an eater of men. Certainly there can be no better summary of the
savage than this, which, as we have seen, unfits him for the duel. He is
the man who cannot love--no, nor even hate--his neighbor as himself.
But this quality in Prussia does have one effect which has reference to
the same question of the lower civilizations. It disposes once and for
all at least of the civilizing mission of Germany. Evidently the Germans
are the last people in the world to be trusted with the task. They are
as short-sighted morally as physically. What is their sophism of
"necessity" but an inability to imagine tomorrow morning? What is their
non-reciprocity but an inability to imagine, not a god or devil, but
merely another man? Are these to judge mankind? Men of two tribes in
Africa not only know that they are all men but can understand that they
are all black men. In this they are quite seriously in advance of the
intellectual Prussian, who cannot be got to see that we are all white
men. The ordinary eye is unable to perceive in the Northeast Teuton
anything that marks him out especially from the more colorless classes
of the rest of Aryan mankind. He is simply a white man, with a tendency
to the gray or the drab. Yet he will explain in serious official
documents that the difference between him and us is a difference between
"the master race and the inferior race."
*How to Know "The Master Race."*
The collapse of German philosophy always occurs at the beginning rather
than the end of an argument, and the difficulty here is that there is no
way of testing which is a master race except by asking which is your own
race. If you cannot find out, (as is usually the case,) you fall back on
the absurd occupation of writing history about prehistoric times. But I
suggest quite seriously that if the Germans can give their philosophy to
the Hottentots there is no reason why they should not give their sense
of superiority to the Hottentots. If they can see such fine shades
between the Goth and the Gaul, there is no reason why similar shades
should not lift the savage above other savages; why any Ojibway should
not discover that he is one tint redder than the Dakotas, or any nigger
in the Kameruns say he is not so black as he is painted. For this
principle of a quite unproved racial supremacy is the last and worst of
the refusals of reciprocity. The Prussian calls all men to admire the
beauty of his large blue eyes. If they do, it is because they have
inferior eyes; if they don't, it is because they have no eyes.
Wherever the most miserable remnant of our race, astray and dried up in
deserts or buried forever under the fall of bad civilization, has some
feeble memory that men are men, that bargains are bargains, that there
are two sides to a question, or even that it takes two to make a
quarrel--that remnant has the right to assist the New Culture, to the
knife and club and the splintered stone. For the Prussian begins all his
culture by that act which is the destruction of all creative thought and
constructive action. He breaks that mirror in the mind in which a man
can see the face of his friend or foe.
*IV.*
*Russia Less Despotic Than Prussia*
The German Emperor has reproached this country (England) with allying
itself with "barbaric and semi-Oriental power." We have already
considered in what sense we use the word barbaric; it is in the sense of
one who is hostile to civilization, not one who is insufficient in it.
But when we pass from the idea of the barbaric to the idea of the
Oriental, the case is even more curious. There is nothing particularly
Tartar in Russian affairs, except the fact that Russia expelled the
Tartars. The Eastern invader occupied and crushed the country for many
years; but that is equally true of Greece, of Spain, and even of
Austria. If Russia has suffered from the East, she has suffered in order
to resist it; and it is rather hard that the very miracle of her escape
should make a mystery about her origin. Jonah may or may not have been
three days inside a fish; but that does not make him a merman. And in
all the other cases of European nations who escaped the monstrous
captivity, we do admit the purity and continuity of the European type.
We consider the old Eastern rule as a wound, but not as a stain.
Copper-colored men out of Africa overruled for centuries the religion
and patriotism of Spaniards. Yet I have never heard that "Don Quixote"
was an African fable on the lines of "Uncle Remus." I have never heard
that the heavy black in the pictures of Velasquez was due to a negro
ancestry. In the case of Spain, which is close to us, we can recognize
the resurrection of a Christian and cultured nation after its age of
bondage. But Russia is rather remote; and those to whom nations are but
names in newspapers can really fancy, like Mr. Baring's friend, that all
Russian churches are "mosques." Yet the land of Turgenev is not a
wilderness of fakirs; and even the fanatical Russian is as proud of
being different from the Mongol as the fanatical Spaniard was proud of
being different from the Moor.
*"Scratch a Russian."*
The town of Reading, as it exists, offers few opportunities for piracy
on the high seas; yet it was the camp of the pirates in Alfred's days. I
should think it hard to call the people of Berkshire half Danish merely
because they drove out the Danes. In short, some temporary submergence
under the savage flood was the fate of many of the most civilized States
of Christendom, and it is quite ridiculous to argue that Russia, which
wrestled hardest, must have recovered least. Everywhere, doubtless, the
East spread a sort of enamel over the conquered countries; but
everywhere the enamel cracked. Actual history, in fact, is exactly
opposite to the cheap proverb invented against the Muscovite. It is not
true to say, "Scratch a Russian and you find a Tartar." In the darkest
hour of the barbaric dominion it was truer to say, "Scratch a Tartar and
you find a Russian." It was the civilization that survived under all the
barbarism. This vital romance of Russia, this revolution against Asia,
can be proved in pure fact; not only from the almost superhuman activity
of Russia during the struggle, but also (which is much rarer as human
history goes) by her quite consistent conduct since. She is the only
great nation which has really expelled the Mongol from her country and
continued to protest against presence of the Mongol in her continent.
Knowing what he had been in Russia, she knew what he would be in Europe.
In this she pursued a logical line of thought, which was, if anything,
too unsympathetic with the energies and religions of the East. Every
other country, one may say, has been an ally of the Turk--that is, of
the Mongol and the Moslem. The French played them as pieces against
Austria; the English warmly supported them under the Palmerston régime;
even the young Italians sent troops to the Crimea; and of Russia and her
Austrian vassal it is nowadays needless to speak. For good or evil, it
is the fact of history that Russia is the only power in Europe that has
never supported the Crescent against the Cross.
That doubtless will appear an unimportant matter, but it may become
important under certain peculiar conditions. Suppose, for the sake of
argument, that there were a powerful Prince in Europe who had gone
ostentatiously out of his way to pay reverence to the remains of the
Tartar, Mongol, and Moslem left as an outpost in Europe. Suppose there
were a Christian Emperor who could not even go to the tomb of the
crucified without pausing to congratulate the last and living crucifier.
If there were an Emperor who gave guns and guides and maps and drill
instructors to defend the remains of the Mongol in Christendom, what
would we say to him? I think at least we might ask him what he meant by
his impudence when he talked about supporting a semi-Oriental power.
That we support a semi-Oriental power we deny. That he has supported an
entirely Oriental power cannot be denied, no, not even by the man who
did it.
_Whom Has Prussia Emancipated?_
But here is to be noted the essential difference between Russia and
Prussia; especially by those who use the ordinary liberal arguments
against the latter Russia has a policy, which she pursues, if you will,
through evil and good; but at least so as to produce good as well as
evil. Let it be granted that the policy has made her oppressive to the
Finns, the Poles--though the Russian Poles feel far less oppressed than
do the Prussian Poles. But it is a mere historic fact, that if Russia
has been a despot to some small nations, she has been a deliverer to
others. She did, so far as in her lay, emancipate the Servians or the
Montenegrins. But whom did Prussia ever emancipate--even by accident? It
is, indeed, somewhat extraordinary that in the perpetual permutations of
international politics the Hohenzollerns have never gone astray into the
path of enlightenment. They have been in alliance with almost everybody
off and on; with France, with England, with Austria, with Russia. Can
any one candidly say that they have left on any one of these people the
faintest impress of progress or liberation? Prussia was the enemy of the
French monarchy, but a worse enemy of the French Revolution. Prussia had
been an enemy of the Czar, but she was a worse enemy of the Duma.
Prussia totally disregarded Austrian rights; but she is today quite
ready to inflict Austrian wrongs. This is the strong particular
difference between the one empire and the other. Russia is pursuing
certain intelligible and sincere ends, which to her at least are ideals,
and for which, therefore, she will make sacrifices and will protect the
weak. But the North German soldier is a sort of abstract tyrant;
everywhere and always on the side of materialistic tyranny. This Teuton
in uniform has been found in strange places; shooting farmers before
Saratoga and flogging soldiers in Surrey, hanging niggers in Africa and
raping girls in Wicklow, but never, by some mysterious fatality, lending
a hand to the freeing of a single city or the independence of one
solitary flag. Wherever scorn and prosperous oppression are, there is
the Prussian; unconsciously consistent, instinctively restrictive,
innocently evil; "following darkness like a dream."
*Disinterested Despotism.*
Suppose we heard of a person (gifted with some longevity) who had helped
Alva to persecute Dutch Protestants, then helped Cromwell to persecute
Irish Catholics, and then helped Claverhouse to persecute Scotch
Puritans--we should find it rather easier to call him a persecutor than
to call him a Protestant or a Catholic. Curiously enough, this is
actually the position in which the Prussian stands in Europe. No
arguments can alter the fact that in three converging and conclusive
cases he has been on the side of three distinct rulers of different
religions, who had nothing whatever in common except that they were
ruling oppressively. In these three Governments, taken separately, one
can see something excusable, or at least human. When the Kaiser
encouraged the Russian rulers to crush the revolution, the Russian
rulers undoubtedly believed they were wrestling with an inferno of
atheism and anarchy. A Socialist of the ordinary English kind cried out
upon me when I spoke of Stolypin and said he was chiefly known by the
halter called "Stolypin's Necktie." As a fact, there were many other
things interesting about Stolypin besides his necktie--his policy of
peasant proprietorship, his extraordinary personal courage, and
certainly none more interesting than that movement in his death agony,
when he made the sign of the cross toward the Czar, as the crown and
captain of his Christianity. But the Kaiser does not regard the Czar as
the captain of Christianity. Far from it. What he supported in Stolypin
was the necktie, and nothing but the necktie; the gallows, and not the
cross. The Russian ruler did believe that the Orthodox Church was
orthodox. The Austrian Archduke did really desire to make the Catholic
Church catholic. He did really believe that he was being pro-Catholic in
being pro-Austrian. But the Kaiser cannot be pro-Catholic, and,
therefore, cannot have been really pro-Austrian; he was simply and
solely anti-Servian; nay, even in the cruel and sterile strength of
Turkey, any one with imagination can see something of the tragedy, and,
therefore, of the tenderness of true belief. The worst that can be said
of the Moslems is, as the poet put it, they offered to man the choice of
the Koran or the sword. The best that can be said for the German is that
he does not care about the Koran, but is satisfied if he can have the
sword. And for me, I confess, even the sins of these three other
striving empires take on, in comparison, something that is sorrowful and
dignified; and I feel they do not deserve that this little Lutheran
lounger should patronize all that is evil in them, while ignoring all
that is good. He is not Catholic; he is not Orthodox; he is not
Mohammedan. He is merely an old gentleman who wishes to share the crime,
though he cannot share the creed. He desires to be a persecutor by the
pang without the palm. So strongly do all the instincts of the Prussian
drive against liberty that he would rather oppress other peoples'
subjects than think of anybody going without the benefits of oppression.
He is a sort of disinterested despot. He is as disinterested as the
devil, who is ready to do any one's dirty work.
*The Paradox of Prussia.*
This would seem obviously fantastic were it not supported by solid facts
which cannot be explained otherwise. Indeed it would be inconceivable if
we were thinking of a whole people, consisting of free and varied
individuals. But in Prussia the governing class is really a governing
class, and a very few people are needed to think along these lines to
make all the other people act along them. And the paradox of Prussia is
this: That while its princes and nobles have no other aim on this earth
but to destroy democracy wherever it shows itself, they have contrived
to get themselves trusted, not as wardens of the past, but as
forerunners of the future. Even they cannot believe that their theory is
popular, but they do believe that it is progressive. Here again we find
the spiritual chasm between the two monarchies in question. The Russian
institutions are, in many cases, really left in the rear of the Russian
people, and many of the Russian people know it. But the Prussian
institutions are supposed to be in advance of the Prussian people, and
most of the Prussian people believe it. It is thus much easier for the
war lords to go everywhere and impose a hopeless slavery upon every one,
for they have already imposed a sort of hopeful slavery on their own
simple race.
*A Factory of Thumbscrews.*