Chinaman is often as good as his bond: and it was amid palm trees and
Syrian pavilions that the great utterance opened the tabernacle to him that
sweareth to his hurt and changeth not. There is doubtless a dense labyrinth
of duplicity in the East, and perhaps more guile in the individual Asiatic
than in the individual German. But we are not talking of the violations
of human morality in various parts of the world. We are talking about a
new and inhuman morality, which denies altogether the day of obligation.
The Prussians have been told by their literary men that everything depends
upon Mood: and by their politicians that all arrangements dissolve before
"necessity." That is the importance of the German Chancellor's phrase. He
did not allege some special excuse in the case of Belgium, which might
make it seem an exception that proved the rule. He distinctly argued, as
on a principle applicable to other cases, that victory was a necessity
and honour was a scrap of paper. And it is evident that the half-educated
Prussian imagination really cannot get any farther than this. It cannot
see that if everybody's action were entirely incalculable from hour to
hour, it would not only be the end of all promises, but the end of all
projects. In not being able to see that, the Berlin philosopher is really
on a lower mental level than the Arab who respects the salt, or the Brahmin
who preserves the caste. And in this quarrel we have a right to come with
scimitars as well as sabres, with bows as well as rifles, with assegai
and tomahawk and boomerang, because there is in all these at least a seed
of civilisation that these intellectual anarchists would kill. And if
they should find us in our last stand girt with such strange swords and
following unfamiliar ensigns, and ask us for what we fight in so singular
a company, we shall know what to reply: "We fight for the trust and for
the tryst; for fixed memories and the possible meeting of men; for all
that makes life anything but an uncontrollable nightmare. We fight for the
long arm of honour and remembrance; for all that can lift a man above the
quicksands of his moods, and give him the mastery of time."