know how far political or family ambition caused each German ruler to cling to the old or to espouse the new.

Throughout this long evolution from Roman to recent times, amid all changes, the two traits which I have called blood-thirstiness and submissiveness persisted. Wherever the Germans fought, they fought with a savage relish of fighting, and they never lost the instinct which made them accept docilely orders from above. Slow, stolid, patient, persevering, they plodded on. Even as late as the eighteenth century they seemed almost to stagnate; no effective, unifying control bound the Pumpernickel States together; and as the princelings lacked initiative, their subjects could not supply it. In civilization, so far as this expresses itself in manners and in social conduct, the Germans were centuries behind their neighbors in Western Europe. Manners, indeed, seem always to have been beyond their reach; whether from a native obtuseness, which renders them dull to the charm of courtesy and

high breeding, or from deliberate Chauvinism, which holds that, as bad manners are German and good manners are foreign, it would be unpatriotic and an admission of inferiority, to replace the indigenous product by an exotic.

Now arose, however, a leader in Germany. The House of Hohenzollern, sprung from medieval highwaymen, their name suggests high-toll-taking gentry, - had come down from the mountains of South Germany and acquired, by successive marriages or conquests, possessions in the Rhineland and the Margravate of Brandenburg. In due time the Elector of Brandenburg created himself King of Prussia, the least civilized of all the German States. But those men of the Northeast, sprung from Slavic, Teutonic, and it may be in part from remote Asiatic strains, kept the traits which had made their predecessors formidable when the Christian era was young: and when one of the most masterful of modern despots awakened and drilled and led them, they responded with the wild joy possible only

to those who revert, after ages of disuse, to their atavistic propensities.

Frederick the Great taught not only the Prussians, but all other Germans, that the strength and very existence of a nation such as he planned depend upon its Army. Virtue, literature, art, science, invention, industry, are subordinate; the Army is indispensable, supreme. "Righteousness," said Solomon, "exalteth a nation." The only exaltation which Frederick relied upon or preached was that of military Might. Frederick had no scruples, and being backed by a sufficient force of Pomeranian grenadiers, he did not need them. He was perfidious, he robbed, he persecuted, he lied; but as his Army was stronger than that of his adversaries he prospered. He laughed at the suggestion that the Divine Vengeance would repay the wicked. Had he not stolen Silesia? Had he not joined in vivisecting Poland? If Divine Vengeance slept on while he was perpetrating such crimes, it must be either a myth or a nonentity; and as Frederick

respected realities only, an absentee avenger, or a God whose traces were only dimly discoverable in the Old Testament, had no terrors for him.

The Hohenzollerns who succeeded Frederick were brutish, but this would not have mattered if they had been competent. The Prussian Army deteriorated. Napoleon humbled Germany and stamped on its map the names of three great French victories, Jena, Eylau and Friedland. Then came the uprising, when at Leipsic the Germans, assisted by the Russians, Austrians, Bavarians, Swedes, and British, broke Napoleon's power. After Waterloo, they enjoyed again independence from foreign dictation, dearer to them than internal liberty. And yet the seeds of Liberty which the French Republic sowed throughout Europe sprang up during the next decades and they burst into brief flowering, in the revolution of 1848-49. Even in Prussia, the masses rose to secure constitutional freedom, and frightened Prince William into an ignominious flight. Presently

Reaction triumphed: the Liberals were defeated; their leaders either fled to America or were shot; the very name of Liberty was silenced.

And now a Prussian greater than Frederick rose up to steady Prussia's shaky nerves, to make Prussia mistress of Germany and Germany arbitress of Europe. To these ends Bismarck revived the Army as the necessary material weapon; but he relied also upon Diplomacy, which he practiced with no more scruples than Machiavelli taught his Prince to observe. By guile he trumped up a pretext for dismembering Denmark; by craft he inveigled Austria to join in that crime; by cunning he then forced Austria to fight for their common spoil; by the falsified Ems dispatch he infuriated France into declaring the war on Prussia which he had been secretly instigating for years. These were the methods by which he created the German Empire: this was the imperious statesman whom the Germans revere. Fit is it that the Prussian ideal should have