good digestion, because the poison of praise does not make him sick. He
thinks the absence of such doubt, or self-knowledge, makes for composure,
grandeur, a colossal calm, a superior race--in short, the whole claim of
the Teutons to be the highest spiritual product of Nature and Evolution.
But as I have noticed a calm unity even more complete, not only in dogs and
negroes, but in slugs, slow-worms, mangoldwurzels, moss, mud and bits of
stone, I am a sceptic about this test for the marshalling in rank of all
the children of God. Now I point this out to you here for a very practical
reason. The Prussian will never understand revolutions--which are
generally reactions. He regards them, not only with dislike, but with a
mysterious kind of pity. Throughout his confused popular histories, there
runs a strange suggestion that civic populations have failed hitherto, and
failed because they were always fighting. The population of Berlin does not
fight, or can't; and therefore Berlin will succeed where Greece and Rome
have failed. Hitherto it is plain enough that Berlin has succeeded in
nothing except in bad copies of Greece and Rome; and Prussians would be
wiser to discuss the details of the Greek and Roman past, which we can
follow, rather than the details of their own future, about which we are
naturally not so well informed. Well, every dome they build, every pillar
they put upright, every pedestal for epitaph or panel for decoration, every
type of church, Catholic or Protestant, every kind of street, large or
small, they have copied from the old Pagan or Catholic cities; and those
cities, when they made those things, were boiling with revolutions. I
remember a German professor saying to me, "I should have no scruple about
extinguishing such republics as Brazil, Venezuela, Bolivia, Nicaragua; they
are perpetually rioting for one thing or another." I said I supposed he
would have had no scruple in extinguishing Athens, Rome, Florence and
Paris; for they were always rioting for one thing or another. His reply
indicated, I thought, that he felt about Cæsar or Rienzi very much as the
Scotch Presbyterian Minister felt about Christ, when he was reminded of the