You could not have even Danish pirates without ships,
or ships without seamanship. This person, whom I may call the Positive
Barbarian, must be rather more superficially up-to-date than what I may
call the Negative Barbarian. Alaric was an officer in the Roman legions:
but for all that he destroyed Rome. Nobody supposes that Eskimos could
have done it at all neatly. But (in our meaning) barbarism is not a matter
of methods, but of aims. We say that these veneered vandals have the
perfectly serious aim of destroying certain ideas, which, as they think,
the world has outgrown; without which, as we think, the world will die.
It is essential that this perilous peculiarity in the Pruss, or Positive
Barbarian, should be seized. He has what he fancies is a new idea; and
he is going to apply it to everybody. As a fact it is simply a false
generalisation; but he is really trying to make it general. This does
not apply to the Negative Barbarian: it does not apply to the Russian
or the Servian, even if they are barbarians. If a Russian peasant does
beat his wife, he does it because his fathers did it before him: he is
likely to beat less rather than more, as the past fades away.
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