the pretences of civilization are blown from men's heads into the
mud like hats in a gust of wind. But when this scripture was
fulfilled among us, the shock was not the less appalling because
a few students of Greek history were not surprised by it. Indeed
these students threw themselves into the orgy as shamelessly as
the illiterate. The Christian priest, joining in the war dance
without even throwing off his cassock first, and the respectable
school governor expelling the German professor with insult and
bodily violence, and declaring that no English child should
ever again be taught the language of Luther and Goethe, were kept
in countenance by the most impudent repudiations of every decency
of civilization and every lesson of political experience on the
part of the very persons who, as university professors,
historians, philosophers, and men of science, were the accredited
custodians of culture. It was crudely natural, and perhaps
necessary for recruiting purposes, that German militarism and
German dynastic ambition should be painted by journalists and
recruiters in black and red as European dangers (as in fact they
are), leaving it to be inferred that our own militarism and our
own political constitution are millennially democratic (which
they certainly are not); but when it came to frantic
denunciations of German chemistry, German biology, German poetry,
German music, German literature, German philosophy, and even
German engineering, as malignant abominations standing towards
British and French chemistry and so forth in the relation of
heaven to hell, it was clear that the utterers of such barbarous
ravings had never really understood or cared for the arts and
sciences they professed and were profaning, and were only the
appallingly degenerate descendants of the men of the seventeenth
and eighteenth centuries who, recognizing no national frontiers