Nevertheless, as I say, the justification of any extra-European aid goes deeper than by any such details.  It rests upon the fact that even other civilizations, even much lower civilizations, even remote and repulsive civilizations, depend as much as our own on this primary principle on which the supermorality 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.

A Fight Against Anarchy.

We are talking about a new 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.”  That is the importance of the German Chancellor’s phrase.  He did not allege some special excuse in the case of Belgium, which might make it seem an exception that proved the rule.  He distinctly argued, as on a principle applicable to other cases, that victory was a necessity and honor was a scrap of paper.  And it is evident that the half-educated Prussian imagination really cannot get any further than this.  It cannot see that if everybody’s action were entirely incalculable from hour to hour, it would not only be the end of all promises but the end of all projects.

In not being able to see that, the Berlin philosopher is really on a lower mental level than the Arab who respects the salt, or the Brahmin who preserves the caste.  And in this quarrel we have a right to come with scimitars as well as sabres, with bows as well as rifles, with assegai and tomahawk and boomerang, because there is in all these at least a seed of civilization that these intellectual anarchists would kill.  And if they should find us in our last stand girt with such strange swords and following unfamiliar ensigns and ask us for what we fight in so singular a company, we shall know what to reply:  “We fight for the trust and for the tryst; for fixed memories and the possible meeting of men; for all that makes life anything but an uncontrollable nightmare.  We fight for the long arm of honor and remembrance; for all that can lift a man above the quicksands of his needs and give him the mastery of time.”

III.

Disposing of Germany’s Civilizing Mission