he executioner: "Mr. Hangman, I
beseech you, do spare me." We are all familiar through Thackeray's
"History of the Georges" with the _chronique scandaleuse_ of the
Hanoverian dynasty. No doubt the Hohenzollern also have had their
_chronique scandaleuse_ and have also attracted the prurient curiosity
of memoir writers. The Court of Berlin in the days of the polygamist
King, Frederick William II., the successor of Old Fritz, was the most
dissolute Court of Europe, as Berlin is to-day the most depraved city
on the Continent. But somehow the scandals of the Hohenzollern seem to
be irrelevant episodes. Somehow we do not think of the annals of the
august House as a history of scandal. We only think of the
Hohenzollern as the political necromancers of modern Europe, as the
supreme masters of statecraft. The very name of the Hohenzollern
recalls to our minds a race of State-builders. Machiavelli selected
the House of Borgia to illustrate the principles of the statecraft of
the Renaissance. A modern Machiavelli would have to go to Potsdam to
study the philosophy of high politics.

From the beginning the Hohenzollern have been identified with the
Prussian State. Louis XIV. said of himself, "_L'etat c'est moi_," but
Louis XIV. was an exception in modern French history. On the contrary,
every Hohenzollern could have applied to himself the words of the
Bourbon King.

If we take each individual Hohenzollern, we find the most obvious
differences between them. No dynasty more strikingly illustrates that
psychological and political peculiarity of royal houses, which may be
called the law of opposites, and which has almost the regularity of a
universal law according to which each ruler is the living contrast of
his predecessor. The successor of the Great Elector, Frederick I.
(1688-1713), the first King of Prussia, was an extravagant fop who
spent a year's income on the ceremony of coronation. On the contrary,
his successor, "Fat William" (1713-1740), the Sergeant-King, was a
miser, who on his coronation only spent 2,227 thalers and ninepence,
where his father had squandered over six millions, a maniac who
collected tall grenadiers as other Kings have collected pictures, who
tortured his children, and who wanted to punish with a death sentence
a juvenile escapade of the heir to the throne. Frederick the Great
(1740-1786), again, was the antithesis of Frederick William I., and
loved literature and art as intensely as his father detested