it must be partly civilized even to destroy
civilization. Such ruin could not be wrought by the savages that are
merely undeveloped or inert. You could not have even Huns without horses
or horses without horsemanship. You could not have even Danish pirates
without ships, or ships without seamanship.

*The "Positive Barbarian."*

This person, whom I may call the positive barbarian, must be rather more
superficially up to date than what I may call the negative barbarian.
Alaric was an officer in the Roman legions, but for all that he
destroyed Rome. Nobody supposes that Eskimos could have done it at all
neatly. But (in our meaning) barbarism is not a matter of methods but of
aims. We say that these veneered vandals have the perfectly serious aim
of destroying certain ideas which, as they think, the world has
outgrown; without which, as we think, the world will die.

It is essential that this perilous peculiarity in the Pruss, or positive
barbarian, should be seized. He has what he fancies is a new idea, and
he is going to apply it to everybody. As a fact, it is simply a false
generalization, but he is really trying to make it general. This does
not apply to the negative barbarian; it does not apply to the Russian or
the Servian, even if they are barbarians. If a Russian peasant does beat
his wife, he does it because his fathers did it before him; he is likely
to beat less rather than more as the past fades away. He does not think,
as the Prussian would, that he has made a new discovery in physiology in
finding that a woman is weaker than a man. If a Servian does knife his
rival without a word, he does it because other Servians have done it. He
may regard it even as piety--but certainly not as progress. He does not
think, as the Prussian does, that he founds a new school of horology by
starting before the word "Go." He does not think he is in advance of the
world in militarism--merely because he is behind it in morals.

No; the danger of the Pruss is that he is prepared to fight for old
errors as if they were new truths. He has somehow heard of certain
shallow simplifications, and imagines that we have never heard of them.
And, as I have said, his limited but very sincere lunacy concentrates
chiefly in a desire to destroy two ideas, the twin root ideas, of
national society. The first is the idea of record and promise; the
second is the idea of reciprocity.

It is plain that the promise, or extension of responsibility