In considering the Prussian point of view we have been considering what seems to be mainly a mental limitation—­a kind of knot in the brain.  Toward the problem of Slav population, of English colonization, of French armies, and of reinforcements it shows the same strange philosophic sulks.  So far as I can follow it, it seems to amount to saying, “It is very wrong that you should be superior to me, because I am superior to you.”  The spokesman of this system seems to have a curious capacity for concentrating this entanglement or contradiction sometimes into a single paragraph, or even a single sentence.  I have already referred to the German Emperor’s celebrated suggestion that in order to avert the peril of Hunnishness we should all become Huns.  A much stronger instance is his more recent order to his troops touching the war in Northern France.  As most people know, his words ran:  “It is my royal and imperial command that you concentrate your energies, for the immediate present, upon one single purpose, and that is that you address all your skill and all the valor of my soldiers to exterminate first the treacherous English and to walk over Gen. French’s contemptible little army.”  The rudeness of the remark an Englishman can afford to pass over.  What I am interested in is the mentality, the train of thought that can manage to entangle itself even in so brief a space.  If French’s little army is contemptible it would seem clear that all the skill and valor of the German Army had better not be concentrated on it, but on the larger and less contemptible allies.  If all the skill and valor of the German Army are concentrated on it it is not being treated as contemptible.  But the Prussian rhetorician had two incompatible sentiments in his mind, and he insisted on saying them both at once.  He wanted to think of an English Army as a small thing; but he also wanted to think of an English defeat as a big thing.  He wanted to exult, at the same moment, in the utter weakness of the British Nation in their attack and the supreme skill and valor of the Germans in repelling such an attack.  Somehow it must be made a common and obvious collapse for England and yet a daring and unexpected triumph for Germany.  In trying to express these contradictory conceptions simultaneously he got rather mixed.  Therefore he bade Germania fill all her vales and mountains with the dying agonies of this almost invisible earwig, and let the impure blood of this cockroach redden the Rhine down to the sea.

Prof.  Harnack’s Reproach.

But it would be unfair to base the criticism on the utterance of any accidental and hereditary Prince; and it is quite equally clear in the case of the philosophers who have been held up to us, even in England, as the very prophets of progress.  And in nothing is it shown more sharply than in the curious, confused talk about race, and especially about the Teutonic race.  Prof.  Harnack and similar people are reproaching