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.
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