By both extremes the woman gets something back out of life.  There is only one place where she gets little or nothing back, and that is the north of Germany.  France and America aim alike at equality; America by similarity, France by dissimilarity.  But North Germany does definitely aim at inequality.  The woman stands up with no more irritation than a butler; the man sits down with no more embarrassment than a guest.  This is the cool affirmation of inferiority, as in the case of the sabre and the tradesmen.  “Thou goest with women; forget not thy whip,” said Nietzsche.  It will be observed that he does not say “poker,” which might come more naturally to the mind of a more common or Christian wife-beater.  But, then, a poker is a part of domesticity, and might be used by the wife as well as the husband.  In fact, it often is.  The sword and the whip are the weapons of a privileged caste.

Pass from the closest of all differences, that between husband and wife, to the most distant of all differences, that of the remote and unrelated races who have seldom seen each other’s faces, and never been tinged with each other’s blood.  Here we still find the same unvarying Prussian principle.  Any European might feel a genuine fear of the Yellow Peril, and many Englishmen, Frenchmen, and Russians have felt and expressed it.  Many might say, and have said, that the heathen Chinee is very heathen indeed; that if he ever advances against us he will trample and torture and utterly destroy, in a way that Eastern people do, but Western people do not.  Nor do I doubt the German Emperor’s sincerity when he sought to point out to us how abnormal and abominable such a nightmare campaign would be, supposing that it could come.

But now comes the comic irony, which never fails to follow on the attempt of the Prussian to be philosophic.  For the Kaiser, after explaining to his troops how important it was to avoid Eastern barbarism, instantly commanded them to become Eastern barbarians.  He told them, in so many words, to be Huns, and leave nothing living or standing behind them.  In fact, he frankly offered a new army corps of aboriginal Tartars to the Far East, within such time as it may take a bewildered Hanoverian to turn into a Tartar.  Any one who has the painful habit of personal thought will perceive here at once the non-reciprocal principle again.  Boiled down to its bones of logic, it means simply this:  “I am a German and you are a Chinaman.  Therefore, I being a German, have a right to be a Chinaman.  But you have no right to be a Chinaman, because you are only a Chinaman.”  This is probably the highest point to which the German culture has risen.

"The Principle of Being Unprincipled."