The Barbarism of Berlin | Page 6

given by Chatham
against the use of the Red Indian: that such allies might do very
diabolical things. But the poor Turco might not unreasonably ask, after
a week-end in Belgium, what more diabolical things he could do than
the highly cultured Germans were doing themselves. Nevertheless, as I
say, the justification of any extra-European aid goes deeper than any
such details. It rests upon the fact that even other civilisations, even
much lower civilisations, even remote and repulsive civilisations,
depend as much as our own on this primary principle, on which the
super-morality of Potsdam declares open War. Even savages promise

things; and respect those who keep their promises. Even Orientals write
things down: and though they write them from right to left, they know
the importance of a scrap of paper. Many merchants will tell you that
the word of the sinister and almost unhuman Chinaman is often as good
as his bond: and it was amid palm trees and Syrian pavilions that the
great utterance opened the tabernacle to him that sweareth to his hurt
and changeth not. There is doubtless a dense labyrinth of duplicity in
the East, and perhaps more guile in the individual Asiatic than in the
individual German. But we are not talking of the violations of human
morality in various parts of the world. We are talking about a new and
inhuman morality, which denies altogether the day of obligation. The
Prussians have been told by their literary men that everything depends
upon Mood: and by their politicians that all arrangements dissolve
before "necessity." That is the importance of the German Chancellor's
phrase. He did not allege some special excuse in the case of Belgium,
which might make it seem an exception that proved the rule. He
distinctly argued, as on a principle applicable to other cases, that
victory was a necessity and honour was a scrap of paper. And it is
evident that the half-educated Prussian imagination really cannot get
any farther than this. It cannot see that if everybody's action were
entirely incalculable from hour to hour, it would not only be the end of
all promises, but the end of all projects. In not being able to see that,
the Berlin philosopher is really on a lower mental level than the Arab
who respects the salt, or the Brahmin who preserves the caste. And in
this quarrel we have a right to come with scimitars as well as sabres,
with bows as well as rifles, with assegai and tomahawk and boomerang,
because there is in all these at least a seed of civilisation that these
intellectual anarchists would kill. And if they should find us in our last
stand girt with such strange swords and following unfamiliar ensigns,
and ask us for what we fight in so singular a company, we shall know
what to reply: "We fight for the trust and for the tryst; for fixed
memories and the possible meeting of men; for all that makes life
anything but an uncontrollable nightmare. We fight for the long arm of
honour and remembrance; for all that can lift a man above the
quicksands of his moods, and give him the mastery of time."

II

THE REFUSAL OF RECIPROCITY
In the last summary I suggested that Barbarism, as we mean it, is not
mere ignorance or even mere cruelty. It has a more precise sense, and
means militant hostility to certain necessary human ideas. I took the
case of the vow or the contract, which Prussian intellectualism would
destroy. I urged that the Prussian is a spiritual Barbarian, because he is
not bound by his own past, any more than a man in a dream. He avows
that when he promised to respect a frontier on Monday, he did not
foresee what he calls "the necessity" of not respecting it on Tuesday. In
short, he is like a child, who at the end of all reasonable explanations
and reminders of admitted arrangements has no answer except "But I
want to."
There is another idea in human arrangements so fundamental as to be
forgotten; but now for the first time denied. It may be called the idea of
reciprocity; or, in better English, of give and take. The Prussian appears
to be quite intellectually incapable of this thought. He cannot, I think,
conceive the idea that is the foundation of all comedy; that, in the eyes
of the other man, he is only the other man. And if we carry this clue
through the institutions of Prussianised Germany, we shall find how
curiously his mind has been limited in the matter. The German differs
from other patriots in the inability to understand patriotism. Other
European peoples pity the Poles or the Welsh for their violated borders;
but Germans only pity themselves.