semi-civilisations 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 round 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 neighbour as himself.

But this quality in Prussia does have one effect which has reference to the
same question of the lower civilisations. It disposes once and for all at
least of the civilising mission of Germany. Evidently the Germans are the
last people in the world to be trusted with the task. They are as
shortsighted morally as physically. What is their sophism of "necessity"
but an inability to imagine to-morrow 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 North-East Teuton anything that marks him out especially
from the more colourless classes of the rest of Aryan mankind. He is simply
a white man, with a tendency to the grey 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." The collapse of
German philosophy always occurs at the beginning rather than the end of an