ievous masterpieces of English literature.

III.

The conspiracy of European historians has thus attached greatness to
the very name of the third Hohenzollern King. Great the Hohenzollern
King certainly was, but his greatness is that of a Condottiere of the
Italian Renascence, of a Catharine de' Medici. It is the greatness of
a personality who is endowed, no doubt, with magnificent gifts, but
who has prostituted all those gifts to the baser usages.

It is passing strange how every writer remains silent about the ugly
and repellent side of Frederick. The son of a mad father, he was
subjected to a terrorism which would have predestined a less strong
nature to the lunatic asylum. The terrorism only hardened Frederick
into an incurable cynic. It only killed in him every finer feeling.
His upbringing must almost inevitably have brought out all the darker
sides of human nature.

The first twenty years of his life were one uninterrupted schooling in
hypocrisy, brutality, and depravity. A debauchee in his youth, a
sodomite in later life, a hater of women and a despiser of men, a
bully to his subordinates, a monster of ingratitude, revelling in
filth so continuously in his written and spoken words that even a
loyal Academy of Berlin has found it impossible to publish his
unexpurgated correspondence, he appears an anachronism in a modern
Europe leavened by two thousand years of Christianity. Ever scheming,
ever plotting, ever seeking whom he might devour, deceiving even his
intimate advisers, he has debased the currency of international
morality. As a man Frederick has been compared with Napoleon. The
comparison is an insult to the Corsican. Napoleon was human, he was
capable of strong affections, of profound attachment and gratitude.
But neither friendship nor love had any place in Frederick's scheme of
the universe.

IV.

To-day we are holding the poor Prussian professor mainly accountable
for the greatest and latest crime of Prussian militarism. But those
dogmatic professors are only the abject disciples of the Hohenzollern
King. There is not one aphorism which is not to be found in the thirty
volumes of Frederick's writings. He has perfected the theory of the
military State, and he has acted consistently on the theory. It is
highly significant that his very first public act, almost never
mentioned by his biographers, was his spoliation of the Prince-Bishop
of Liege (an historical precedent tragically suggestive at