Now this horse is intellectually the wrong horse.  It is not perhaps going too far to say that this horse is a donkey.  For it is obviously within even the intellectual resources of a haddock to answer, “But if a haddock is a horse, why should I yield to you any more than you to me?  Why should that singing horse commonly called the nightingale, or that climbing horse hitherto known as the cat, fall down and worship you because of your horsehood?  If all our native faculties are the accomplishments of a horse—­why then you are only another horse without any accomplishments.”  When thus gently reasoned with, the horse flings up his heels, kicks the cat, crushes the oyster, eats the haddock and pursues the nightingale, and that is how the war began.

This apologue is not in the least more fantastic than the facts of the Teutonic claim.  The Germans do really say that Englishmen are only Sea-Germans, as our haddocks were only sea-horses.  They do really say that the nightingales of Tuscany or the pearls of Hellas must somehow be German birds or German jewels.  They do maintain that the Italian Renaissance was really the German Renaissance, pure Germans having Italian names when they were painters, as cockneys sometimes have when they are hair-dressers.  They suggest that Jesus and the great Jews were Teutonic.  One Teutonist I read actually explained the fresh energy of the French Revolution and the stale privileges of its German enemies by saying that the Germanic soul awoke in France and attacked the Latin influence in Germany.  On the advantages of this method I need not dwell:  if you are annoyed at Jack Johnson knocking out an English prize-fighter, you have only to say that it was the whiteness of the black man that won and the blackness of the white man that was beaten.  But about the Italian Renaissance they are less general and will go into detail.  They will discover (in their researches into ’istry, as Mr. Gandish said) that Michael Angelo’s surname was Buonarotti; and they will point out that the word “roth” is very like the word “rot.”  Which, in one sense, is true enough.  Most Englishmen will be content to say it is all rot and pass on.  It is all of a piece with the preposterous Prussian history, which talks, for instance, about the “perfect religious tolerance of the Goths”; which is like talking about the legal impartiality of chicken-pox.  He will decline to believe that the Jews were Germans; though he may perhaps have met some Germans who were Jews.  But deeper than any such practical reply, lies the deep inconsistency of the parable.  It is simply this; that if Teutonism be used for comprehension it cannot be used for conquest.  If all intelligent peoples are Germans, then Prussians are only the least intelligent Germans.  If the men of Flanders are as German as the men of Frankfort, we can only say that in saving Belgium we are helping the Germans who are in the right against the Germans who are in the wrong.  Thus in Alsace the conquerors are forced