Anyone can see this well enough, merely by reading the last negotiations between London and Berlin.  The Prussians had made a new discovery in international politics:  that it may often be convenient to make a promise; and yet curiously inconvenient to keep it.  They were charmed, in their simple way, with this scientific discovery, and desired to communicate it to the world.  They therefore promised England a promise, on condition that she broke a promise, and on the implied condition that the new promise might be broken as easily as the old one.  To the profound astonishment of Prussia, this reasonable offer was refused!  I believe that the astonishment of Prussia was quite sincere.  That is what I mean when I say that the Barbarian is trying to cut away that cord of honesty and clear record on which hangs all that men have made.

The friends of the German cause have complained that Asiatics and Africans upon the very verge of savagery have been brought against them from India and Algiers.  And in ordinary circumstances, I should sympathise with such a complaint made by a European people.  But the circumstances are not ordinary.  Here, again, the quiet unique barbarism of Prussia goes deeper than what we call barbarities.  About mere barbarities, it is true, the Turco and the Sikh would have a very good reply to the superior Teuton.  The general and just reason for not using non-European tribes against Europeans is that given by Chatham against the use of the Red Indian:  that such allies might do very diabolical things.  But the poor Turco might not unreasonably ask, after a week-end in Belgium, what more diabolical things he could do than the highly cultured Germans were doing themselves.  Nevertheless, as I say, the justification of any extra-European aid goes deeper than any such details.  It rests upon the fact that even other civilisations, even much lower civilisations, even remote and repulsive civilisations, depend as much as our own on this primary principle, on which the super-morality of Potsdam declares open War.  Even savages promise things; and respect those who keep their promises.  Even Orientals write things down:  and though they write them from right to left, they know the importance of a scrap of paper.  Many merchants will tell you that the word of the sinister and almost unhuman Chinaman is often as good as his bond:  and it was amid palm trees and Syrian pavilions that the great utterance opened the tabernacle to him that sweareth to his hurt and changeth not.  There is doubtless a dense labyrinth of duplicity in the East, and perhaps more guile in the individual Asiatic than in the individual German.  But we are not talking of the violations of human morality in various parts of the world.  We are talking about a new and inhuman morality, which denies altogether the day of obligation.  The Prussians have been told by their literary men that everything depends upon Mood:  and by their politicians that all arrangements dissolve before “necessity.”