To begin with, it goes so much deeper even than atrocities; of which, in the past, at least, all the three empires of Central Europe have partaken pretty equally; as they partook of Poland.  An English writer, seeking to avert the war by warnings against Russian influence, said that the flogged backs of Polish women stood between us and the Alliance.  But not long before the flogging of women by an Austrian General led to that officer being thrashed in the streets of London by Barclay and Perkins draymen.  And as for the third power, the Prussians, it seems clear that they have treated Belgian women in a style compared with which flogging might be called an official formality.

But, as I say, something much deeper than any such recrimination lies behind the use of the word on either side.  When the German Emperor complains of our allying ourselves with a barbaric and half Oriental power, he is not (I assure you) shedding tears over the grave of Kosciusko.  And when I say (as I do most heartily) that the German Emperor is a barbarian, I am not merely expressing any prejudices I may have against the profanation of churches or of children.  My countrymen and I mean a certain and intelligible thing when we call the Prussians barbarians.  It is quite different from the thing attributed to Russians; and it could not possibly be attributed to Russians.  It is very important that the neutral world should understand what this thing is.

If the German calls the Russian barbarous, he presumably means imperfectly civilized.  There is a certain path along which Western nations have proceeded in recent times; and it is tenable that Russia has not proceeded so far as the others; that she has less of the special modern system in science, commerce, machinery, travel, or political constitution.  The Russ plows with an old plow; he wears a wild beard; he adores relics; his life is as rude and hard as that of a subject of Alfred the Great.  Therefore, he is, in the German sense, a barbarian.  Poor fellows, like Gorky and Dostoieffsky, have to form their own reflections on the scenery, without the assistance of large quotations from Schiller on garden seats; or inscriptions directing them to pause and thank the All-Father for the finest view in Hesse-Pumpernickel.  The Russians, having nothing but their faith, their fields, their great courage, and their self-governing communes, are quite cut off from what is called (in the fashionable street in Frankfort) the true, the beautiful, and the good.  There is a real sense in which one can call such backwardness barbaric, by comparison with the Kaiserstrasse; and in that sense it is true of Russia.