Given this, it is indeed true that behind these facts there are truths—­truths of a terrible, of a spiritual sort.  In mere fact the Germanic power has been wrong about Servia, wrong about Russia, wrong about Belgium, wrong about England, wrong about Italy.  But there was a reason for its being wrong everywhere, and of that root reason, which has moved half the world against it, I shall speak later in this series.  For that is something too omnipresent to be proved, too indisputable to be helped by detail.  It is nothing less than the locating, after more than a hundred years of recriminations and wrong explanations, of the modern European evil—­the finding of the fountain from which poison has flowed upon all the nations of the earth.

II.

Russian or Prussian Barbarism?

It will hardly be denied that there is one lingering doubt in many who recognize unavoidable self-defense in the instant parry of the English sword and who have no great love for the sweeping sabre of Sadowa and Sedan.  That doubt is the doubt of whether Russia, as compared with Prussia, is sufficiently decent and democratic to be the ally of liberal and civilized powers.  I take first, therefore, this matter of civilization.

It is vital in a discussion like this that we should make sure we are going by meanings and not by mere words.  It is not necessary in any argument to settle what a word means or ought to mean.  But it is necessary in every argument to settle what we propose to mean by the word.  So long as our opponent understands what is the thing of which we are talking, it does not matter to the argument whether the word is or is not the one he would have chosen.  A soldier does not say, “We were ordered to go to Mechlin, but I would rather go to Malines.”  He may discuss the etymology and archaeology of the difference on the march, but the point is that he knows where to go.  So long as we know what a given word is to mean in a given discussion, it does not even matter if it means something else in some other and quite distinct discussion.  We have a perfect right to say that the width of a window comes to four feet, even if we instantly and cheerfully change the subject to the larger mammals and say that an elephant has four feet.  The identity of the words does not matter, because there is no doubt at all about the meanings, because nobody is likely to think of an elephant as four feet long, or of a window as having tusks and a curly trunk.

Two Meanings of “Barbarian."

It is essential to emphasize this consciousness of the thing under discussion in connection with two or three words that are, as it were, the keywords of this war.  One of them is the word “barbarian.”  The Prussians apply it to the Russians, the Russians apply it to the Prussians.  Both, I think, really mean something that really exists, name or no name.  Both mean different things.  And if we ask what these different things are we shall understand why England and France prefer Russia, and consider Prussia the really dangerous barbarian of the two.