The Barbarism of Berlin | Page 9

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 ever 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. Anyone 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 German culture has risen.
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 civilisations or
semi-civilisations 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 round 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 neighbour as
himself.
But this quality in Prussia does have one effect which has reference to
the same quest of the lower civilisations. It disposes once and for all at
least of the civilising mission of Germany. Evidently the Germans are
the last people in the world to be trusted with the task. They are as
shortsighted morally as physically. What is their sophism of "necessity"
but an inability to imagine to-morrow 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 North-East Teuton,
anything that marks him out especially from the more colourless
classes of the rest of Aryan mankind. He is simply a white man, with a
tendency to the grey 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." 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