our to
hour, it would not only be the end of all promises, but the end of all
projects. In not being able to see that, the Berlin philosopher is really
on a lower mental level than the Arab who respects the salt, or the Brahmin
who preserves the caste. And in this quarrel we have a right to come with
scimitars as well as sabres, with bows as well as rifles, with assegai
and tomahawk and boomerang, because there is in all these at least a seed
of civilisation that these intellectual anarchists would kill. And if
they should find us in our last stand girt with such strange swords and
following unfamiliar ensigns, and ask us for what we fight in so singular
a company, we shall know what to reply: "We fight for the trust and for
the tryst; for fixed memories and the possible meeting of men; for all
that makes life anything but an uncontrollable nightmare. We fight for the
long arm of honour and remembrance; for all that can lift a man above the
quicksands of his moods, and give him the mastery of time."

II

THE REFUSAL OF RECIPROCITY

In the last summary I suggested that Barbarism, as we mean it, is not mere
ignorance or even mere cruelty. It has a more precise sense, and means
militant hostility to certain necessary human ideas. I took the case of the
vow or the contract, which Prussian intellectualism would destroy. I urged
that the Prussian is a spiritual Barbarian, because he is not bound by his
own past, any more than a man in a dream. He avows that when he promised
to respect a frontier on Monday, he did not foresee what he calls "the
necessity" of not respecting it on Tuesday. In short, he is like a child,
who at the end of all reasonable explanations and reminders of admitted
arrangements has no answer except "But I _want_ to."

There is another idea in human arrangements so fundamental as to be
forgotten; but now for the first time denied. It may be called the idea
of reciprocity; or, in better English, of give and take. The Prussian
appears to be quite intellectually incapable of this thought. He cannot,
I think, conceive the idea that is the foundation of all comedy; that, in
the eyes of the other man, he is only the other man. And if we carry this
clue through the institutions of Prussianised Germany, we shall find how
curiously his mind has been limited in the matter. The German differs from
other patriots in the inability to understand patriotism. Other European
peoples pity the Poles or the Welsh