ion of Prussian history, we are naturally driven to ask
ourselves who is primarily responsible for that sinister influence
which Prussia has exercised for the last two centuries. To the
unprejudiced student there can be no doubt that the one man primarily
responsible is Frederick the Great, the master-builder of Prussian
militarism and Prussian statecraft. He it is who has been poisoning
the wells; he it is who first conceived of the State as a barracks; he
it is who has "Potsdamized" the Continent and transformed Europe into
a military camp. Strangely enough, all civilized nations to-day have
proclaimed Prussia accursed. Yet we continue to hero-worship the man
who made Prussia what she is. A halo still surrounds the
Mephistophelian figure which incarnates the Hohenzollern spirit. A
legend has gathered round the philosopher of Sans Souci. A combination
of circumstances has caused writers almost unanimously to extol his
merits and to ignore his crimes. British historians naturally favour
the ally of the Seven Years' War. Russian and Austrian writers are
indulgent to the accomplice of the partition of Poland. Anti-clerical
writers glorify the Atheist. Military writers extol the soldier.
Political writers extol the statesman. But the most adequate
explanation of the Frederician legend is the circumstance that public
opinion has been systematically mobilized in favour of Frederick the
Great by the great French leaders of the eighteenth century, the
dispensers of European fame.

It was not for nothing that Frederick the Great for forty years
courted the good graces of Voltaire d'Alembert. He knew full well that
Voltaire would prove to him a most admirable publicity agent. And
never was publicity agent secured at a lower cost. Those literary
influences have continued to our own day to perpetuate the legend of
Frederick. Nearly a hundred years after Rossbach Frederick had the
strange good fortune to captivate the wayward genius of Carlyle. It is
difficult to understand how Carlyle, who all through life hesitated
between the Christian Puritanism of John Knox and the Olympian
paganism of Goethe, could have been fascinated by the Potsdam cynic.
We can only seek for an explanation in the deeply rooted anti-French
and pro-German prejudices of Carlyle. Frederick was the arch-enemy of
France, and that fact was sufficient to attract the sympathies of
Teufelsdroeckh. It is Carlyle's Gallophobia which has inspired one of
the most misch