And if we wish to test the truth of this,
it can be done by the same method which showed us that Russia, if her
race or religion could sometimes make her an invader and an oppressor,
could also be made an emancipator and a knight errant. In the same way,
if the Russian institutions are old-fashioned, they honestly exhibit the
good as well as the bad that can be found in old-fashioned things. In
their police system they have an inequality which is against our ideas
of law. But in their commune system they have an equality that is older
than law itself. Even when they flogged each other like barbarians, they
called each other by their Christian names like children. At their
worst, they retained all the best of a rude society. At their best, they
are simply good, like good children or good nuns. But in Prussia, all
that is best in the civilized machinery is put at the service of all
that is worst in the barbaric mind. Here again the Prussian has no
accidental merits, none of those lucky survivals, none of those late
repentances, which make the patchwork glory of Russia. Here all is
sharpened to a point and pointed to a purpose; and that purpose, if
words and acts have any meaning at all, is the destruction of liberty
throughout the world.

*V.*

*The "Bond of Teutonism"*

In considering the Prussian point of view we have been considering what
seems to be mainly a mental limitation--a kind of knot in the brain.
Toward the problem of Slav population, of English colonization, of
French armies, and of reinforcements it shows the same strange
philosophic sulks. So far as I can follow it, it seems to amount to
saying, "It is very wrong that you should be superior to me, because I
am superior to you." The spokesman of this system seems to have a
curious capacity for concentrating this entanglement or contradiction
sometimes into a single paragraph, or even a single sentence. I have
already referred to the German Emperor's celebrated suggestion that in
order to avert the peril of Hunnishness we should all become Huns. A
much stronger instance is his more recent order to his troops touching
the war in Northern France. As most people know, his words ran: "It is
my royal and imperial command that you concentrate your energies, for
the immediate present, upon one single purpose, and that is that you
address all your skill and all the valor of my soldiers to exterminate
first the treacherous English and to walk over Gen. Fr