Quotation from: The Appetite of Tyranny

Written by: G.K. Chesterton


But this quality in Prussia does have one effect which has reference to the
same question of the lower civilisations. It disposes once and for all at
least of the civilising mission of Germany. Evidently the Germans are the
last people in the world to be trusted with the task. They are as
shortsighted morally as physically. What is their sophism of "necessity"
but an inability to imagine to-morrow morning? What is their
non-reciprocity but an inability to imagine, not a god or devil,
but merely another man? Are these to judge mankind? Men of two tribes
in Africa not only know that they are all men, but can understand
that they are all black men. In this they are quite seriously in
advance of the intellectual Prussian; who cannot be got to see
that we are all white men. The ordinary eye is unable to perceive
in the North-East Teuton anything that marks him out especially
from the more colourless classes of the rest of Aryan mankind. He is simply
a white man, with a tendency to the grey or the drab. Yet he will explain,
in serious official documents, that the difference between him and us is a
difference between "the master-race and the inferior-race." The collapse of
German philosophy always occurs at the beginning rather than the end of an
argument; and the difficulty here is that there is no way of testing which
is a master-race except by asking which is your own race. If you cannot
find out (as is usually the case) you fall back on the absurd occupation of
writing history about pre-historic times. But I suggest quite seriously
that if the Germans can give their philosophy to the Hottentots, there is
no reason why they should not give their sense of superiority to the
Hottentots. If they can see such fine shades between the Goth and the
Gaul, there is no reason why similar shades should not lift the savage
above other savages; why any Ojibway should not discover that he is one
tint redder than the Dacotahs; or any nigger in the Cameroons say he is not
so black as he is painted. For this principle of a quite unproved racial
supremacy is the last and worst of the refusals of reciprocity. The
Prussian calls all men to admire the beauty of his large blue eyes. If they
do, it is because they have inferior eyes: if they don't, it is because
they have no eyes.

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