LINGERING BARBARISM. 639 



Is it a matter for surprise, then, that Jewish persecution has found a 

 foothold in the universities, among boys at their studies; that this Ger- 

 man youth hurrahs for Treitschke, that Slavonic sprout, with his ex- 

 clusive German utterances ; or that their trainers in classics .need to 

 be reminded of good morals by paying them in the same coin they use 

 to enlighten the babes and sucklings committed to their care ? 



Why should these boy-pupils, these buff-jerkined and jack-booted 

 swaggerers, ingrained and inwi"Ought in their very baby natures with 

 the notion of distinction in ranks, not fall upon the " old-clo' peddler 

 fellows," and all the more savagely because these dare to aim at be- 

 coming their rivals ? How can one expect them to be just to descend- 

 ants of an alien race, when it has been preached and crammed into 

 them, from their breech-clout days, that the world's weal depends on 

 their race alone ; that their seed alone is called to lordship; and that all 

 other nations in their rottenness are intended for nothing else but for 

 service as their subjects and self-sacrifice to their mastery ? 



The root of the matter lies very much deeper. The world of an- 

 tiquity, on which the education of our youth has been nourished since 

 the middle ages, and is fed now, was founded on the institution of 

 slavery ; its whole existence would be as inconceivable apart from 

 slavery as would be the aboriginal German w^orld without woman's 

 servile labor for her lazy lord and husband. The ancient German 

 Tacitus drew was a hunter and fighter, stretched at odd times on his 

 bear-skin, guzzling and gambling, while his Thusneldas and serfs did 

 all the work for him, tilling the ground and sweating for his food. 

 That was the German civilization which our students chant in their 

 songs ; and its traces are the tattoo-scars across their faces, of which 

 they are so proud, though these are mere proofs of clumsiness, not 

 signs of dangers met. 



All the cultivation of the middle ages rested on so-called classical 

 studies, which are bound up in the closest relations with barbarous and 

 violent use of power. The Spanish mock stateliness of mediaeval scho- 

 lasticism is indivisible from the savagery of mediaeval university life, 

 and we have accepted it in these modern days along with the rest of 

 our inheritance, and find it cherished and protected in our universities 

 by the powers that be. 



Our age strives and struggles for the recognition of the exact 

 sciences which have thoroughly penetrated our life, as opposed to 

 those systems of so called humanist education handed down to us from 

 the middle ages. Uni-esting, unfaltering, exact science presses for- 

 ward with its methods and results. It feeds and clothes vis, multiplies 

 our means of intercourse, controls our w^hole political and domestic 

 economy, masters our thought and our feeling, and daily wins us new 

 fruits of good in the struggle for existence. It knows no distinctions 

 of peoples, castes, and nations ; no qualification of territory or geo- 

 graphical restriction. There is no such thing as German steam-power, 



