rn tradition, that sinister spirit which
lives in the wasps' and hornets' nest of Berlin, that spirit which has
"Potsdamized" Europe, and which has debased the moral currency of
European politics.

III.--LANDMARKS IN HOHENZOLLERN HISTORY.

No one would call the political history of Germany an interesting
history. It is only the history of free nations or the free play of
spiritual forces that is of abiding human interest, and the history of
Germany is neither the history of a free people nor the conflict of
spiritual forces. That history is so intolerably tedious that even the
magic of Treitschke's genius has not been able to relieve its dulness,
and that before the war no British or French publisher dared venture
on a translation of Treitschke's masterpiece. But if the political
history of Germany has all the tedium and monotony of parochialism, on
the contrary, the personal history of the Hohenzollern is intensely
instructive. One would hesitate to call it romantic. Yet there is an
element of romance, the romance of business, the interest which
attaches to the rise of a family from the humble obscurity of a petty
princeling to the power and prestige of world rulers, the same kind of
interest which belongs to the life-story of Mr. Vanderbilt or Mr.
Carnegie. What a progress those Hohenzollerns have made from the
distant days when they left their little Swabian southern home of
Zollern between the Neckar and the Upper Danube, the cradle of their
dynasty! _Nomen, omen!_ Does not the very sound of the word
_Hohenzollern_ suggest and inspire high ambitions? And does not the
very name of that little village of Zollern, which is apparently
derived from _Zoll_, suggest that all the world was henceforth to pay
a Zoll, or toll, to the dynasts of Hohenzollern?

And what a strange succession of incidents! In themselves those
incidents may seem insignificant. They left little trace in the
chronicles of olden times. Yet those petty incidents have proved
decisive events in the annals of modern humanity. We see those events
happening from generation to generation without any apparent
connection. Yet somehow they all made for the aggrandizement of the
family. We see successive Princes acquiring through marriage and
inheritance possessions in scattered and remote outposts of the Holy
Roman Empire. Yet somehow all those outposts became eventually
milestones on the highway to greatness. One ancestor becomes Burgrave
of Nuremberg--a