supreme among all German states. The present war, again deliberately provoked, as we shall see, was undertaken after fifty years of preparation, to make Prussia supreme in Europe and the world.

"*

And the sea, too, shall be his. "Our future lies upon the water," the Kaiser had announced, and on New Year's Day of the new century he had proclaimed:

"You must in ceaseless labor offer all the powers of body and soul to the building up and development of our troops, and, just as my grandfather labored for his land forces, so, undeterred, I shall carry through to its completion the work of reorganizing my navy in order that it may stand justified at the side of my army, and that through it the German Empire may also be in a position to win outwardly the place which she has not yet attained.

"When both are united I hope to be in a position, firmly trusting in the leadership of God, to carry into effect the saying of Frederick William I: 'If one wishes to decide anything in the world, it cannot be done with the pen unless the pen is supported by the force of the sword.""

*"The German Emperor as Shown in His Public Utterances," by Christian Gauss, p. 126.

From the Kaiser's speech, January 1, 1900, in "The German Emperor as Shown in His Public Utterances," pp. 156–7.

We have considered so far largely the conception of the mission of Germany held by her present masters, and have shown how it was potentially antagonistic. But it is not only in her idea of her mission that Prussia is antagonistic to us, but in her conception of the state, its purpose and morality in the abstract.

Germany, as we have seen, is not a democracy. It is even less so in spirit than in form, for her constitution was deliberately framed by Bismarck to deceive the people and give them the semblance of power but not its substance. It has never been so, and in 1848 was much more nearly democratic in aspiration than it is to-day. In Germany, in Prussia particularly, Kaiser and König, Obrigkeit, Offizier, and Rat are words to conjure with to a degree undreamed of in liberal lands, and so long as the mass of the people pay to these arrogant dignitaries an exaggerated honor, there is little likelihood that any one of them will surrender his privilege in the interest of equality.

The German type of mind is anachronistic, feudal. While all other modern European nations were liberalizing themselves, Germany

remained in spirit what she had been. In political matters she is the hermit-crab of the nineteenth century. While other governments have been reducing themselves to a common basis of liberal constitutions and democratic spirit which bade fair to bring in a new era of varied but none the less equal nations mingling in a richer cosmopolitanism, the Prussian sulked in his tent or drilled behind the guard-house. He did this with conviction and in accordance with his religion of the state. The German occasionally arrives at the point where he can take his nationality for granted. The Prussian never. He is the provincial of the modern world; he protrudes his nationality into his intercourse with equals and it is difficult for him to be a gentleman. This is far truer now than it was 150 years ago, and if we would understand the causes of the war we must not fail to note which way the tides have been running in Prussia. The modern nations and Germany are farther asunder to-day than they were when our country was founded. Consider her men of letters. Before 1800 Schiller was developing the theory of the Weltbürger, the citizen of the

world, and chose as the subjects of his great plays Wilhelm Tell, the Swiss national hero, the Maid of Orleans, the French national heroine, and Mary Stuart, a queen of Scotland. They are all treated with rich sympathy and understanding. Can you imagine Hauptmann or Sudermann doing as much? Of jingo patriotism Goethe, the large-minded, spoke disparagingly as jene alte Römer Tugend, that oldfashioned Roman virtue. Lessing said it was a virtue of which he was happy to say he had little. Herder, the only Prussian man of letters of any rank, ran away from Prussian militarism in order to breathe the more liberal air of Catherine the Great's Russia. The spirit which we have come to associate with Germany and of whose meaning we were largely unaware is a development of the last century. Prussia revived after her successful war with France. In that war many Americans sympathized with Germany and felt that the movement toward the consolidation of nationalities had made another inevitable step forward. But in that movement the Franco-Prussian War was tragic. It did not unify Germany as the Italian wars

unified Italy, for Prussia was not attempting, as the world fondly imagined, to bring about the nationalization of Germany. Nothing was farther from her thought. She wished to create and did create Greater Prussia and gave to the new state, instead of liberal institutions, her mediæval-minded monarch and his efficient organization and militarism. The pliant little states of Saxony, Bavaria, and Württemberg, with an honorable tradition of decent living and love of literature and art which Prussia never had, were bound to her victorious chariotwheels. They hated Prussia yet they became her vassals. She gave them an ideal German only in name. They lost their independence because they had neither the means nor the will to defend it. And they lacked the will since they lacked the tradition of Anglo-Saxon freedom and were used to vassalage. Their necks were calloused to the feudal yoke. They wore it lightly, to be sure, for their submission was voluntary and not servile. It was part of their traditional organization. They accepted Prussia as their suzerain.

Historians do not know exactly how or