de an emancipator and a knight errant. In the same way, if the Russian
institutions are old-fashioned, they honestly exhibit the good as well as
the bad that can be found in old-fashioned things. In their police system
they have an inequality which is against our ideas of law. But in their
commune system they have an equality that is older than law itself. Even
when they flogged each other like barbarians, they called upon each other
by their Christian names like children. At their worst they retained all
the best of a rude society. At their best, they are simply good, like good
children or good nuns. But in Prussia all that is best in the civilised
machinery is put at the service of all that is worst in the barbaric mind.
Here again the Prussian has no accidental merits, none of those lucky
survivals, none of those late repentances, which make the patchwork glory
of Russia. Here all is sharpened to a point and pointed to a purpose and
that purpose, if words and acts have any meaning at all, is the destruction
of liberty throughout the world.

IV

THE ESCAPE OF FOLLY

In considering the Prussian point of view we have been considering what
seems to be mainly a mental limitation: a kind of knot in the brain.
Towards the problem of Slav population, of English colonisation, of French
armies and reinforcements, it shows the same strange philosophic sulks. So
far as I can follow it, it seems to amount to saying "It is very wrong that
you should be superior to me, because I am superior to you." The spokesmen
of this system seem to have a curious capacity for concentrating this
entanglement or contradiction, sometimes into a single paragraph, or even a
single sentence. I have already referred to the German Emperor's celebrated
suggestion that in order to avert the peril of Hunnishness we should all
become Huns. A much stronger instance is his more recent order to his
troops touching the war in Northern France. As most people know, his words
ran "It is my Royal and Imperial command that you concentrate your
energies, for the immediate present, upon one single purpose, and that is
that you address all your skill and all the valour of my soldiers to
exterminate first the treacherous English and to walk over General French's
contemptible little Army." The rudeness of the remark an Englishman can
afford to pass over; what I am interested in is the mentality; the train of
thought that can manage to entangle itself even in so b