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 prehistoric 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 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 w