nd 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 brief a space