Now we, the French and English, do not mean this when we call the Prussians barbarians.  If their cities soared higher than their flying ships, if their trains traveled faster than their bullets, we should still call them barbarians.  We should know exactly what we meant by it; and we should know that it is true.  For we do not mean anything that is an imperfect civilization by accident.  We mean something that is the enemy of civilization by design.  We mean something that is willfully at war with the principles by which human society has been made possible hitherto.  Of course, it must be partly civilized even to destroy civilization.  Such ruin could not be wrought by the savages that are merely undeveloped or inert.  You could not have even Huns without horses or horses without horsemanship.  You could not have even Danish pirates without ships, or ships without seamanship.

The “Positive Barbarian."

This person, whom I may call the positive barbarian, must be rather more superficially up to date than what I may call the negative barbarian.  Alaric was an officer in the Roman legions, but for all that he destroyed Rome.  Nobody supposes that Eskimos could have done it at all neatly.  But (in our meaning) barbarism is not a matter of methods but of aims.  We say that these veneered vandals have the perfectly serious aim of destroying certain ideas which, as they think, the world has outgrown; without which, as we think, the world will die.

It is essential that this perilous peculiarity in the Pruss, or positive barbarian, should be seized.  He has what he fancies is a new idea, and he is going to apply it to everybody.  As a fact, it is simply a false generalization, but he is really trying to make it general.  This does not apply to the negative barbarian; it does not apply to the Russian or the Servian, even if they are barbarians.  If a Russian peasant does beat his wife, he does it because his fathers did it before him; he is likely to beat less rather than more as the past fades away.  He does not think, as the Prussian would, that he has made a new discovery in physiology in finding that a woman is weaker than a man.  If a Servian does knife his rival without a word, he does it because other Servians have done it.  He may regard it even as piety—­but certainly not as progress.  He does not think, as the Prussian does, that he founds a new school of horology by starting before the word “Go.”  He does not think he is in advance of the world in militarism—­merely because he is behind it in morals.

No; the danger of the Pruss is that he is prepared to fight for old errors as if they were new truths.  He has somehow heard of certain shallow simplifications, and imagines that we have never heard of them.  And, as I have said, his limited but very sincere lunacy concentrates chiefly in a desire to destroy two ideas, the twin root ideas, of national society.  The first is the idea of record and promise; the second is the idea of reciprocity.