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 civilization 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 honor and remembrance; for all
that can lift a man above the quicksands of his needs and give him the
mastery of time."

*III.*

*Disposing of Germany's Civilizing Mission*

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 Prussianized 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 for their violated borders,
but Germans only pity themselves. They might take forcible possession of
the Severn or the Danube, of the Thames or the Tiber, of the Garry or
the