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 for ever under the fall of bad civilisations, 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 resist 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 and foe.
III
THE APPETITE OF TYRANNY
The German Emperor has reproached this country 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 civilisation, 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.
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