The Escape of Folly

In considering the Prussian point of view we have been considering what
seems to be mainly a mental limitation: a kind of knot in the brain.
Towards the problem of Slav population, of English colonisation, of French
armies and reinforcements, it shows the same strange philosophic sulks. So
far as I can follow it, it seems to amount to saying "It is very wrong that
you should be superior to me, because I am superior to you." The spokesmen
of this system seem to have a curious capacity for concentrating this
entanglement or contradiction, sometimes into a single paragraph, or even a
single sentence. I have already referred to the German Emperor's celebrated
suggestion that in order to avert the peril of Hunnishness we should all
become Huns. A much stronger instance is his more recent order to his
troops touching the war in Northern France. As most people know, his words
ran "It is my Royal and Imperial command that you concentrate your
energies, for the immediate present, upon one single purpose, and that is
that you address all your skill and all the valour of my soldiers to
exterminate first the treacherous English and to walk over General French's
contemptible little Army." The rudeness of the remark an Englishman can
afford to pass over; what I am interested in is the mentality; the train of
thought that can manage to entangle itself even in so brief a space. If
French's little Army is contemptible, it would seem clear that all the
skill and valour of the German Army had better not be concentrated on it,
but on the larger and less contemptible allies. If all the skill and
valour of the German Army are concentrated on it, it is not being treated
as contemptible. But the Prussian rhetorician had two incompatible
sentiments in his mind; and he insisted on saying them both at once. He
wanted to think of an English Army as a small thing; but he also wanted to
think of an English defeat as a big thing. He wanted to exult, at the same
moment, in the utter weakness of the British in their attack; and the
supreme skill and valour of the Germans in repelling such an attack.
Somehow it must be made a common and obvious collapse for England; and yet
a daring and unexpected triumph for Germany. In trying to express these
contradictory conceptions simultaneously, he got rather mixed. Therefore he
bade Germania fill all her vales and mountains with the dying agonies of
this almost invisible earwig; and let the impure blood of this cockroach
redden the Rhine down to the sea.

But it would be unfair to base the criticism on the utterance of any
accidental and hereditary prince: and it is quite equally clear in the case
of the philosophers who have been held up to us, even in England, as the
very prophets of