upstart royal "brother."

But the very fact that the Hohenzollern are the "parvenus" of European
royalty has spurred them on to more strenuous endeavours and to still
higher ambitions. Their sole endeavour was to raise their position:
_sich considerable machen_, as the Great Elector said in his quaint
pidgin German. They were not born to the royal dignity. They had to
make it. They were not accepted as Kings. They had to assert
themselves and to impose their claims. The good sword of Frederick the
Great asserted his claims with such results that, except Napoleon, no
ruler ever since has disputed the right of the Hohenzollern to rank
amongst the dynasts of Europe.

V.--PRUSSIA AS AN UPSTART STATE.

Even as the Hohenzollern are an upstart dynasty, so the Prussian State
may be called an upstart State. It has not, like France, Great
Britain, or Spain, two thousand years of history behind it. Until the
end of the Middle Ages Christian civilization was bounded by the Elbe.
The Prussian populations were the last in Europe to be converted to
Christianity, and recent history has proved only too conclusively that
the conversion never struck deep roots. Until the end of the Middle
Ages the religious and military Order of the Teutonic Knights had to
wage war against the Prussian heathen, and the magnificent ruin of
Marienburg, the stately seat of the Teutonic Knights, still testifies
to the achievements of the Order. Marienburg is the only historic city
of Prussia; Berlin is but a mushroom growth of modern days. Whilst
London and Paris go back to the beginning of European history, Berlin
only three hundred years ago was a mean village inhabited by Wendish
savages.

It cannot be sufficiently emphasized that Prussia is not a nation, but
a State, and that State is an entirely artificial creation. France and
Great Britain are the slow and natural growths of many centuries. They
have definite geographical boundaries, their people have common
traditions, common ideals, common affinities. The Prussian State is
made up of a heterogeneous mosaic of provinces, the spoils of
successive invasions. What hold together the artificial fabric of the
Prussian State are only the dynasty, the bureaucracy, and the Army.
The bureaucracy and the Army are to Prussia what the Civil Service and
the British Army are to the Indian Empire. Suppress the British Army
and the Civil Service, and British rule ceases to exist. Suppress the
Hohenzollern dynast