It is the spirit of second-rate civilisation; and the distinction involves
the most important differences. Granted that it could exist, pure barbarism
could not last long; as pure babyhood cannot last long. Of his own nature
the baby is interested in the ticking of a watch; and the time will come
when you will have to tell him, if you only tell him the wrong time. And
that is exactly what the second-rate civilisation does.

But the vital point is here. The abstract barbarian would copy. The cockney
and incomplete civilisation always sets itself up to be copied. And in the
case here considered, the German thinks that it is not only his business to
spread education, but to spread compulsory education. "Science combined
with organisation," says Professor Ostwald of Berlin University, "makes us
terrible to our opponents and ensures a German future for Europe." That is,
as shortly as it can be put, what we are fighting about. We are fighting to
prevent a German future for Europe. We think it would be narrower, nastier,
less sane, less capable of liberty and of laughter, than any of the worst
parts of the European past. And when I cast about for a form in which to
explain shortly why we think so, I thought of you. For this is a matter so
large that I know not how to express it except in terms of artists like
you, in the service of beauty and the faith in freedom. Prussia, at least
cannot help me; Lord Palmerston, I believe, called it a country of damned
professors. Lord Palmerston, I fear, used the word "damned" more or less
flippantly. I use it reverently.

Rome, at her very weakest, has always been a river that wanders and widens
and that waters many fields. Berlin, at its strongest, will never be
anything but a whirlpool, which seeks its own centre, and is sucked down.
It would only narrow all the rest of Europe, as it has already narrowed all
the rest of Germany. There is a spirit of diseased egoism, which at last
makes all things spin upon one pin-point in the brain. It is a spirit