word on either side. When the German Emperor
complains of our allying ourselves with a barbaric and half Oriental
power, he is not (I assure you) shedding tears over the grave of
Kosciusko. And when I say (as I do most heartily) that the German
Emperor is a barbarian, I am not merely expressing any prejudices I may
have against the profanation of churches or of children. My countrymen
and I mean a certain and intelligible thing when we call the Prussians
barbarians. It is quite different from the thing attributed to Russians;
and it could not possibly be attributed to Russians. It is very
important that the neutral world should understand what this thing is.

If the German calls the Russian barbarous, he presumably means
imperfectly civilized. There is a certain path along which Western
nations have proceeded in recent times; and it is tenable that Russia
has not proceeded so far as the others; that she has less of the special
modern system in science, commerce, machinery, travel, or political
constitution. The Russ plows with an old plow; he wears a wild beard; he
adores relics; his life is as rude and hard as that of a subject of
Alfred the Great. Therefore, he is, in the German sense, a barbarian.
Poor fellows, like Gorky and Dostoieffsky, have to form their own
reflections on the scenery, without the assistance of large quotations
from Schiller on garden seats; or inscriptions directing them to pause
and thank the All-Father for the finest view in Hesse-Pumpernickel. The
Russians, having nothing but their faith, their fields, their great
courage, and their self-governing communes, are quite cut off from what
is called (in the fashionable street in Frankfort) the true, the
beautiful, and the good. There is a real sense in which one can call
such backwardness barbaric, by comparison with the Kaiserstrasse; and in
that sense it is true of Russia.

Now we, the French and English, do not mean this when we call the
Prussians barbarians. If their cities soared higher than their flying
ships, if their trains traveled faster than their bullets, we should
still call them barbarians. We should know exactly what we meant by it;
and we should know that it is true. For we do not mean anything that is
an imperfect civilization by accident. We mean something that is the
enemy of civilization by design. We mean something that is willfully at
war with the principles by which human society has been made possible
hitherto. Of course,