The principle here neglected, which may be called mutuality by those who misunderstand and dislike the word equality, does not offer so clear a distinction between the Prussian and the other peoples as did the first Prussian principle of an infinite and destructive opportunism; or, in other words, the principle of being unprincipled.  Nor upon this second can one take up so obvious a position touching the other civilizations or semi-civilizations of the world.  Some idea of oath and bond there is in the rudest tribes, in the darkest continents.  But it might be maintained, of the more delicate and imaginative element of reciprocity, that a cannibal in Borneo understands it almost as little as a professor in Berlin.  A narrow and one-sided seriousness is the fault of barbarians all over the world.  This may have been the meaning, for aught I know, of the one eye of the Cyclops; that the barbarian cannot see around things or look at them from two points of view, and thus becomes a blind beast and an eater of men.  Certainly there can be no better summary of the savage than this, which, as we have seen, unfits him for the duel.  He is the man who cannot love—­no, nor even hate—­his neighbor as himself.

But this quality in Prussia does have one effect which has reference to the same question of the lower civilizations.  It disposes once and for all at least of the civilizing mission of Germany.  Evidently the Germans are the last people in the world to be trusted with the task.  They are as short-sighted morally as physically.  What is their sophism of “necessity” but an inability to imagine tomorrow morning?  What is their non-reciprocity but an inability to imagine, not a god or devil, but merely another man?  Are these to judge mankind?  Men of two tribes in Africa not only know that they are all men but can understand that they are all black men.  In this they are quite seriously in advance of the intellectual Prussian, who cannot be got to see that we are all white men.  The ordinary eye is unable to perceive in the Northeast Teuton anything that marks him out especially from the more colorless classes of the rest of Aryan mankind.  He is simply a white man, with a tendency to the gray or the drab.  Yet he will explain in serious official documents that the difference between him and us is a difference between “the master race and the inferior race.”

How to Know “The Master Race."

The collapse of German philosophy always occurs at the beginning rather than the end of an argument, and the difficulty here is that there is no way of testing which is a master race except by asking which is your own race.  If you cannot find out, (as is usually the case,) you fall back on the absurd occupation of writing history about prehistoric times.  But I suggest quite seriously that if the Germans can give their philosophy to the Hottentots there is no reason why they should not give their sense of superiority to the Hottentots.  If they can