In the last summary I suggested that barbarism, as we mean it, is not mere ignorance or even mere cruelty.  It has a more precise sense, and means militant hostility to certain necessary human ideas.  I took the case of the vow or the contract which Prussian intellectualism would destroy.  I urged that the Prussian is a spiritual barbarian, because he is not bound by his own past, any more than a man in a dream.  He avows that when he promised to respect a frontier on Monday he did not foresee what he calls “the necessity” of not respecting it on Tuesday.  In short, he is like a child who at the end of all reasonable explanations and reminders of admitted arrangements has no answer except “But I want to.”

There is another idea in human arrangements so fundamental as to be forgotten, but now for the first time denied.  It may be called the idea of reciprocity; or, in better English, of give and take.  The Prussian appears to be quite intellectually incapable of this thought.  He cannot, I think, conceive the idea that is the foundation of all comedy—­that in the eyes of the other man he is only the other man.  And if we carry this clue through the institutions of Prussianized Germany we shall find how curiously his mind has been limited in the matter.  The German differs from other patriots in the inability to understand patriotism.  Other European peoples pity the Poles or the Welsh for their violated borders, but Germans only pity themselves.  They might take forcible possession of the Severn or the Danube, of the Thames or the Tiber, of the Garry or the Garonne—­and they would still be singing sadly about how fast and true stands the watch on the Rhine and what a shame it would be if any one took their own little river away from them.  That is what I mean by not being reciprocal; and you will find it in all that they do, as in all that is done by savages.

"Laughs When He Hurts You."

Here again it is very necessary to avoid confusing this soul of the savage with mere savagery in the sense of brutality or butchery, in which the Greeks, the French, and all the most civilized nations have indulged in hours of abnormal panic or revenge.  Accusations of cruelty are generally mutual.  But it is the point about the Prussian that with him nothing is mutual.  The definition of the true savage does not concern itself even with how much more he hurts strangers or captives than do the other tribes of men.  The definition of the true savage is that he laughs when he hurts you and howls when you hurt him.  This extraordinary inequality in the mind is in every act and word that comes from Berlin.

For instance, no man of the world believes all he sees in the newspapers, and no journalist believes a quarter of it.  We should therefore be quite ready in the ordinary way to take a great deal off the tales of German atrocities; to doubt this story or deny that.  But there is one thing that we cannot doubt or deny—­the seal and authority of the Emperor.  In the imperial proclamation the fact that certain “frightful” things have been done is admitted and justified on the ground of their frightfulness.  It was a military necessity to terrify the peaceful populations with something that was not civilized, something that was hardly human.