lost scrap of paper; almost
what one would call a scrap of waste-paper. Here again the pedants under
consideration exhibit the illogical perversity that makes the brain reel.
There is obligation and there is no obligation: sometimes it appears that
Germany and England must keep faith with each other; sometimes that Germany
need not keep faith with anybody and anything; sometimes that we alone
among European peoples are almost entitled to be Germans; sometimes that
besides us, Russians and Frenchmen almost rise to a Germanic loveliness of
character. But through all there is, hazy but not hypocritical, this sense
of some common Teutonism.

Professor Haeckel, another of the witnesses raised up against us, attained
to some celebrity at one time through proving the remarkable resemblance
between two different things by printing duplicate pictures of the same
thing. Professor Haeckel's contribution to biology, in this case, was
exactly like Professor Harnack's contribution to ethnology. Professor
Harnack knows what a German is like. When he wants to imagine what an
Englishman is like, he simply photographs the same German over again. In
both cases there is probably sincerity as well as simplicity. Haeckel
was so certain that the species illustrated in embryo really are closely
related and linked up, that it seemed to him a small thing to simplify it
by mere repetition. Harnack is so certain that the German and Englishman
are almost alike, that he really risks the generalisation that they are
exactly alike. He photographs, so to speak, the same fair and foolish face
twice over; and calls it a remarkable resemblance between cousins. Thus, he
can prove the existence of Teutonism just about as conclusively as Haeckel
has proved the more tenable proposition of the non-existence of God.

Now the German and the Englishman are not in the least alike--except
in the sense that neither of them are negroes. They are, in everything
good and evil, more unlike than any other two men we can take at random
from the great European family. They are opposite from the roots of
their history, nay of their geography. It is an understatement to call
Britain insular. Britain is not only an island, but an island slashed by
the sea till it nearly splits into three islands; and even the Midlands
can almost smell the salt. Germany is a powerful, beautiful and fertile
inland country, which can only find the sea by one or two twisted and
narrow paths, as