New York Times Current History: The European War, Vol 1, No. 1: From the Beginning to March, 1915, With IndexVarious
History
New York Times Current History: The European War, Vol 1, No. 1: From the Beginning to March, 1915, With Index
Various
World War, 1914-1918
Pass from the closest of all differences, that between husband and wife,
to the most distant of all differences, that of the remote and unrelated
races who have seldom seen each other's faces, and never been tinged
with each other's blood. Here we still find the same unvarying Prussian
principle. Any European might feel a genuine fear of the Yellow Peril,
and many Englishmen, Frenchmen, and Russians have felt and expressed it.
Many might say, and have said, that the heathen Chinee is very heathen
indeed; that if he ever advances against us he will trample and torture
and utterly destroy, in a way that Eastern people do, but Western people
do not. Nor do I doubt the German Emperor's sincerity when he sought to
point out to us how abnormal and abominable such a nightmare campaign
would be, supposing that it could come.
But now comes the comic irony, which never fails to follow on the
attempt of the Prussian to be philosophic. For the Kaiser, after
explaining to his troops how important it was to avoid Eastern
barbarism, instantly commanded them to become Eastern barbarians. He
told them, in so many words, to be Huns, and leave nothing living or
standing behind them. In fact, he frankly offered a new army corps of
aboriginal Tartars to the Far East, within such time as it may take a
bewildered Hanoverian to turn into a Tartar. Any one who has the painful
habit of personal thought will perceive here at once the non-reciprocal
principle again. Boiled down to its bones of logic, it means simply
this: "I am a German and you are a Chinaman. Therefore, I being a
German, have a right to be a Chinaman. But you have no right to be a
Chinaman, because you are only a Chinaman." This is probably the highest
point to which the German culture has risen.
*"The Principle of Being Unprincipled."*
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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