Quotation from: The Appetite of Tyranny

Written by: G.K. Chesterton


But here is to be noted the essential difference between Russia and
Prussia; especially by those who use the ordinary Liberal arguments against
the latter. Russia has a policy which she pursues, if you will, through
evil and good; but at least so as to produce good as well as evil. Let it
be granted that the policy has made her oppressive to the Finns and the
Poles--though the Russian Poles feel far less oppressed than do the
Prussian Poles. But it is a mere historic fact, that if Russia has been a
despot to some small nations, she has been a deliverer to others. She did,
so far as in her lay, emancipate the Servians or the Montenegrins. But
whom did Prussia ever emancipate--even by accident? It is indeed somewhat
extraordinary that in the perpetual permutations of international politics
the Hohenzollerns have never gone astray into the path of enlightenment.
They have been in alliance with almost everybody off and on; with France,
with England, with Austria, with Russia. Can any one candidly say that they
have left on any one of these people the faintest impress of progress or
liberation? Prussia was the enemy of the French Monarchy; but a worse
enemy of the French Revolution. Prussia had been an enemy of the Czar; but
she was a worse enemy of the Duma. Prussia totally disregarded Austrian
rights; but she is to-day quite ready to inflict Austrian wrongs. This is
the strong particular difference between the one empire and the other.
Russia is pursuing certain intelligible and sincere ends, which to her at
least are ideals, and for which, therefore, she will make sacrifices and
will protect the weak. But the North German soldier is a sort of abstract
tyrant, everywhere and always on the side of materialistic tyranny. This
Teuton in uniform has been found in strange places; shooting farmers before
Saratoga and flogging soldiers in Surrey, hanging niggers in Africa and
raping girls in Wicklow; but never, by some mysterious fatality, lending a
hand to the freeing of a single city or the independence of one solitary
flag. Wherever scorn and prosperous oppression are, there is the Prussian;
unconsciously consistent, instinctively restrictive, innocently evil;
"following darkness like a dream."

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