Pass from the closest of all differences, that between husband and wife, to the most distant of all differences, that of the remote and unrelated races who have seldom seen each other’s faces, and never been tinged with each other’s blood.  Here we still find the same unvarying Prussian principle.  Any European might feel a genuine fear of the Yellow Peril; and many Englishmen, Frenchmen, and Russians have felt and expressed it.  Many might say, and have said, that the Heathen Chinee is very heathen indeed; that if he ever advances against us he will trample and torture and utterly destroy, in a way that Eastern people do, but Western people do not.  Nor do I doubt the German Emperor’s sincerity when he sought to point out to us how abnormal and abominable such a nightmare campaign would be, supposing that it could ever come.  But now comes the comic irony; which never fails to follow on the attempt of the Prussian to be philosophic.  For the Kaiser, after explaining to his troops how important it was to avoid Eastern Barbarism, instantly commanded them to become Eastern Barbarians.  He told them, in so many words, to be Huns:  and leave nothing living or standing behind them.  In fact, he frankly offered a new army corps of aboriginal Tartars to the Far East, within such time as it may take a bewildered Hanoverian to turn into a Tartar.  Anyone who has the painful habit of personal thought will perceive here at once the non-reciprocal principle again.  Boiled down to its bones of logic, it means simply this:  “I am a German and you are a Chinaman.  Therefore I, being a German, have a right to be a Chinaman.  But you have no right to be a Chinaman; because you are only a Chinaman.”  This is probably the highest point to which German culture has risen.

The principle here neglected, which may be called Mutuality by those who misunderstand and dislike the word Equality, does not offer so clear a distinction between the Prussian and the other peoples as did the first Prussian principle of an infinite and destructive opportunism; or, in other words, the principle of being unprincipled.  Nor upon this second can one take up so obvious a position touching the other civilisations or semi-civilisations of the world.  Some idea of oath and bond there is in the rudest tribes, in the darkest continents.  But it might be maintained, of the more delicate and imaginative element of reciprocity, that a cannibal in Borneo understands it almost as little as a professor in Berlin.  A narrow and one-sided seriousness is the fault of barbarians all over the world.  This may have been the meaning, for aught I know, of the one eye of the Cyclops:  that the Barbarian cannot see round things or look at them from two points of view; and thus becomes a blind beast and an eater of men.  Certainly there can be no better summary of the savage than this, which, as we have seen, unfits him for the duel.  He is the man who cannot love—­no, nor even hate—­his neighbour as himself.