vance 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 pre-historic 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 Ojibway should not discover that he is one
tint redder than the Dacotahs; or any nigger in the Cameroons say he is not
so black as he is painted. For this principle of a quite unproved racial
supremacy is the last and worst of the refusals of reciprocity. 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 forever 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 or 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 host