f a horse--why then you are only another horse without
any accomplishments." When thus gently reasoned with, the horse flings
up his heels, kicks the cat, crushes the oyster, eats the haddock and
pursues the nightingale, and that is how the war began.

This apologue is not in the least more fantastic than the facts of the
Teutonic claim. The Germans do really say that Englishmen are only
Sea-Germans, as our haddocks were only sea-horses. They do really say
that the nightingales of Tuscany or the pearls of Hellas must somehow be
German birds or German jewels. They do maintain that the Italian
Renaissance was really the German Renaissance, pure Germans having
Italian names when they were painters, as cockneys sometimes have when
they are hair-dressers. They suggest that Jesus and the great Jews were
Teutonic. One Teutonist I read actually explained the fresh energy of
the French Revolution and the stale privileges of its German enemies by
saying that the Germanic soul awoke in France and attacked the Latin
influence in Germany. On the advantages of this method I need not dwell:
if you are annoyed at Jack Johnson knocking out an English
prize-fighter, you have only to say that it was the whiteness of the
black man that won and the blackness of the white man that was beaten.
But about the Italian Renaissance they are less general and will go into
detail. They will discover (in their researches into 'istry, as Mr.
Gandish said) that Michael Angelo's surname was Buonarotti; and they
will point out that the word "roth" is very like the word "rot." Which,
in one sense, is true enough. Most Englishmen will be content to say it
is all rot and pass on. It is all of a piece with the preposterous
Prussian history, which talks, for instance, about the "perfect
religious tolerance of the Goths"; which is like talking about the legal
impartiality of chicken-pox. He will decline to believe that the Jews
were Germans; though he may perhaps have met some Germans who were Jews.
But deeper than any such practical reply, lies the deep inconsistency of
the parable. It is simply this; that if Teutonism be used for
comprehension it cannot be used for conquest. If all intelligent peoples
are Germans, then Prussians are only the least intelligent Germans. If
the men of Flanders are as German as the men of Frankfort, we can only
say that in saving Belgium we are helping the Germans who are in the
right against the Germans who are in the wrong. Thus