but a gift.
Such are the visions of remote places that appear in the low gateways
of a Gothic town; as if each gateway led into a separate world;
and almost as if each dome of sky were a different chamber.
But he who walks round the walls of this city in this spirit will come
suddenly upon an exception which will surprise him like an earthquake.
It looks indeed rather like something done by an earthquake;
an earthquake with a half-witted sense of humour. Immediately at
the side of one of these humble and human gateways there is a great gap
in the wall, with a wide road running through it. There is something
of unreason in the sight which affects the eye as well as the reason.
It recalls some crazy tale about the great works of the Wise Men
of Gotham. It suggests the old joke about the man who made
a small hole for the kitten as well as a large hole for the cat.
Everybody has read about it by this time; but the immediate impression
of it is not merely an effect of reading or even of reasoning.
It looks lop-sided; like something done by a one-eyed giant.
But it was done by the last prince of the great Prussian imperial system,
in what was probably the proudest moment in all his life of pride.

What is true has a way of sounding trite; and what is trite has
a way of sounding false. We shall now probably weary the world
with calling the Germans barbaric, just as we very recently wearied
the world with calling them cultured and progressive and scientific.
But the thing is true though we say it a thousand times. And any one who
wishes to understand the sense in which it is true has only to contemplate
that fantasy and fallacy in stone; a gate with an open road beside it.
The quality I mean, however, is not merely in that particular contrast;
as of a front door standing by itself in an open field.
It is also in the origin, the occasion and the whole story of the thing.
There is above all this supreme stamp of the barbarian; the sacrifice
of the permanent to the temporary. When the walls of the Holy City
were overthrown for the glory of the German Emperor, it was hardly
even for that everlasting glory which has been the vision and
the temptation of great men. It was for the glory of a single day.
It was something rather in the nature of a holiday than anything
that could be even in the most vainglorious sense a heritage.
It did not in the ordinary sense make a monument, or even a trophy.
It destroyed a monument to make