see such fine shades between the Goth and the Gaul, there is no reason why similar shades should not lift the savage above other savages; why any Ojibway should not discover that he is one tint redder than the Dakotas, or any nigger in the Kameruns say he is not so black as he is painted.  For this principle of a quite unproved racial supremacy is the last and worst of the refusals of reciprocity.  The Prussian calls all men to admire the beauty of his large blue eyes.  If they do, it is because they have inferior eyes; if they don’t, it is because they have no eyes.

Wherever the most miserable remnant of our race, astray and dried up in deserts or buried forever under the fall of bad civilization, has some feeble memory that men are men, that bargains are bargains, that there are two sides to a question, or even that it takes two to make a quarrel—­that remnant has the right to assist the New Culture, to the knife and club and the splintered stone.  For the Prussian begins all his culture by that act which is the destruction of all creative thought and constructive action.  He breaks that mirror in the mind in which a man can see the face of his friend or foe.

IV.

Russia Less Despotic Than Prussia

The German Emperor has reproached this country (England) with allying itself with “barbaric and semi-Oriental power.”  We have already considered in what sense we use the word barbaric; it is in the sense of one who is hostile to civilization, not one who is insufficient in it.  But when we pass from the idea of the barbaric to the idea of the Oriental, the case is even more curious.  There is nothing particularly Tartar in Russian affairs, except the fact that Russia expelled the Tartars.  The Eastern invader occupied and crushed the country for many years; but that is equally true of Greece, of Spain, and even of Austria.  If Russia has suffered from the East, she has suffered in order to resist it; and it is rather hard that the very miracle of her escape should make a mystery about her origin.  Jonah may or may not have been three days inside a fish; but that does not make him a merman.  And in all the other cases of European nations who escaped the monstrous captivity, we do admit the purity and continuity of the European type.  We consider the old Eastern rule as a wound, but not as a stain.  Copper-colored men out of Africa overruled for centuries the religion and patriotism of Spaniards.  Yet I have never heard that “Don Quixote” was an African fable on the lines of “Uncle Remus.”  I have never heard that the heavy black in the pictures of Velasquez was due to a negro ancestry.  In the case of Spain, which is close to us, we can recognize the resurrection of a Christian and cultured nation after its age of bondage.  But Russia is rather remote; and those to whom nations are but names in newspapers can really fancy, like Mr. Baring’s friend, that all Russian churches are “mosques.”  Yet the land of Turgenev is not a wilderness of fakirs; and even the fanatical Russian is as proud of being different from the Mongol as the fanatical Spaniard was proud of being different from the Moor.