INTRODUCTION

“There is a race on Scythia’s verge extremeEastward beyond the Tauris’ chilly stream.The Northern Bear looks on no uglier crew;Bare is their garb, their bodies foul to view,Their souls are ne’er subdued to sturdy toilOr Ceres’ webs. Their sustenance is spoil.With horrid wounds they gash their brutal browsAnd o’er their murdered parents bind their vows....”

“There is a race on Scythia’s verge extreme

Eastward beyond the Tauris’ chilly stream.

The Northern Bear looks on no uglier crew;

Bare is their garb, their bodies foul to view,

Their souls are ne’er subdued to sturdy toil

Or Ceres’ webs. Their sustenance is spoil.

With horrid wounds they gash their brutal brows

And o’er their murdered parents bind their vows....”

In these words, Claudian the poet of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, describes the Huns of the fifth century, the brood of Attila to whom the German Kaiser appealed before the whole world when he sent his brother to China to meet the Boxers:—

“When you meet the foe you will defeat him. No quarter will be given, no prisoners will be taken. Let all who fall into your hands be at your mercy. Just as the Huns a thousand years ago under the leadership of Attila gained a reputation in virtue of which they still live in historic tradition, so may the name of Germany become known in such a manner in China that no Chinaman will ever again dare even to look askance at a German.”

These words will never be forgotten, for they have since been translated into action not only upon the Chinese but upon the body of Europe, upon the Belgians and the people of Northern France as upon the long martyred people of Poland.

That appeal to the Hun startled Europe, and yet had we remembered the history of Prussia, had we recalled the ethnology of that race we ought not to have been surprised, for the Hun and the Prussian have certainly much in common even racially, and Attila, or Etzel, as the Germans call him, has ever played his part in the Nibelungenlied and the legends of the Prussian people.

We know so little of the Huns of the fifth century: who they were, whence indeed they came and whither they went, that it is impossible definitely to assert or to deny that the Prussians of to-day are their actual descendants. We must, it seems, give up the old theory which Gibbon took from De Guignes that this savage people were identical with the Hioung-nou whose ravages are recorded in the history of China; but of this at least it seems we may be sure, that they were a Turanian race, a race to which the Finns, Bulgarians and Magyars also belong as wellas the Croatians and the Turks. Can we with any certainty claim that the Prussians also are of this family?

Quatrefages has demonstrated that the population of the Prussias is by its ethnological origin essentially Finno-Slavian. In every respect, he asserts, and history bears him out, Prussia is ethnologically distinct from the peoples she now rules over under the pretence of a unity of race with them. Identity of language may mask this truth, but it cannot alter it, for the difference is real and fundamental.

Teutonic Germany has accepted Prussia as its sovereign, and no one can question her right to do so; but being what she is, she has been led astray by an anthropological error. Not content with subordinating herself to these Finno-Slavs the real Germany has adopted their hatred and worked out the brutal instincts of these strangers whose iron yoke she has placed upon her nobler spirit. Her union with Prussia has been founded by the sword and by blood, cemented by war and crowned by spoliation. It is a crime not less than the crime of that Attila to whom Prussia appeals as her true and original hero, and now, as then, we have the right to believein a divine Nemesis. What shall it profit a man if he gain the whole world and lose his own soul?

It would seem, then, that as well physically as spiritually the Prussians in so far as they are Finnic[1]are of the same Turanian stock to which the Huns belonged and if only thus related to them. That the relationship is closer still a thousand things of which we are witnesses to-day, as for many hundred years past, would lead us to surmise. And if they are not the same Barbarians, their barbarism is the same.

It was at any rate Attila’s name that Kaiser Wilhelm II flung across an astonished world a decade ago as the French might cry out upon Charlemagne or Blessed Joan of Arc or Napoleon. And since he has appealed to the Huns, to the Huns let him go.

For us there remain these facts to be considered, if, as is so difficult, we are to benefit from the lessons of History.

Rome always defeated the Barbarians, butnever succeeded in destroying their power to renew the attack. Stilicho defeated Alaric whenever he met him, yet Alaric at last entered Rome. Aetius broke Attila repeatedly, yet Attila at last was able to threaten Italy. Belisarius and Narses broke Vitiges and Totila, yet these Barbarians ruined the peninsula. In spite of defeat the attack was always renewed, because Rome had never really broken the Barbarian power. And if we to-day spare the Germanies the uttermost price and the last, if we fail to push this war to the bitter and the necessary end, in twenty years or in fifty they will fall upon us again and perhaps in an hour for us less fortunate. Delenda est Carthago.

It was perhaps not within the power of Rome to break once and for all the advance of the Barbarians. Time has been upon our side. To-day if our courage and our endurance are strong enough, if we set our face like a flint, we may once for all rid Europe of this Barbarian peril, which, now as always intent on the destruction and the loot of civilisation, pleads necessity, invokes its gods, and knows neither justice nor mercy.

Rome could not mobilise: we can. In the old days the Barbarians could break offfirst the point, as it were, of civilisation, then a little more, and so on till the butt choked them. They can no longer do that. The railway and the automobile, the telegraph and the telephone have endowed us with such a power of mobilisation that we can compel the Barbarians to meet the butt of civilisation first instead of last. If we have the will we may destroy once and for all the power of the Barbarians, who have attempted to destroy civilisation, not only under Alaric, Attila, and Totila, but under Frederick of Hohenstaufen and Luther, and having finally overcome them we may erect once more in Europe the Pax Romana and perhaps—who knows?—even the old unity of Christendom.

May, 1915.

FOOTNOTES:[1]Godron says with truth: “The Prussians are neither Germans nor Slavs; the Prussians are the Prussians. But one must remember that they were of Finno-Slavonic race, not Teutonic, and were subject to the King of Poland till comparatively recent times. They remained heathen long after the rest of Germany was Christianised.”

[1]Godron says with truth: “The Prussians are neither Germans nor Slavs; the Prussians are the Prussians. But one must remember that they were of Finno-Slavonic race, not Teutonic, and were subject to the King of Poland till comparatively recent times. They remained heathen long after the rest of Germany was Christianised.”

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