'
"Or suppose the Teutonic teachers and pastors had read with
understanding and taken to heart the passages of Csesar in which he
curtly describes the violent and thievish qualities of the ancient
Germans--how they spread desolation around them to protect their
borders, and encouraged their young men in brigandage in order to
keep them in practice. Might not these plain lessons have been
used as a warning to the people of modern Germany to discourage
their predatory propensities and their habits of devastation and to
hold them back from their relapse into the _Schrecklichkeit_
of savage warfare? George Meredith says a good thing in 'Diana
of the Crossways': 'Before you can civilize a man, you must first
de-barbarize him.' That is the trouble with the Germans, especially
their leaders and masters. They have never gotten rid of their
fundamental barbarism, the idolatry of might above right.
They have only put on a varnish of civilization.
It cracks and peels off in the heat.
"Take one more illustration. Suppose these German thought-masters
and war-lords had really understood and assimilated the true greatness
of the conception of the old Roman Empire as it is shown, let us
say, by Virgil.
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