position and
tradition of Prussia among the German States; secondly, the peculiar
authority exercised by the Imperial House of Hapsburg-Lorraine at
Vienna over its singularly heterogeneous subjects.

(3) PRUSSIA.

The Germans have always been, during their long history, a race
inclined to perpetual division and sub-division, accompanied by war
and lesser forms of disagreement between the various sections. Their
friends have called this a love of freedom, their enemies political
incompetence; but, without giving it a good or a bad name, the plain
fact has been, century after century, that the various German tribes
would not coalesce. Any one of them was always willing to take service
with the Roman Empire, in the early Roman days, against any one of the
others, and though there have been for short periods more or less
successful attempts to form one nation of them all in imitation of the
more civilized States to the west and south, these attempts have never
succeeded for very long.

But it so happens that about two hundred years ago, or a little more,
there appeared one body of German-speaking men rather different from
the rest, and capable ultimately of leading the rest, or at least a
majority of the rest.

[Illustration: Sketch 2.]

I use the words "German-speaking" and "rather different" because this
particular group of men, though speaking German, were of less pure
German blood than almost any other of the peoples that spoke that
tongue. They were the product of a conquest undertaken late in the
Middle Ages by German knights over a mixed Pagan population,
Lithuanian and Slavonic, which inhabited the heaths and forests along
the Baltic Sea. These German knights succeeded in their task, and
compelled the subject population to accept Christianity, just as the
Germans themselves had been compelled to accept it by their more
powerful and civilized neighbours the French hundreds of years before.
The two populations of this East Baltic district, the large majority
which was Slavonic and Lithuanian, and the minority which was really
German, mixed and produced a third thing, which we now know as the
_Prussian_. The cradle of this Prussian race was, then, all that flat
country of which Koenigsberg and Danzig are the capitals, but
especially Koenigsberg--"King's Town"--where the monarchs of this
remote people were crowned. By an historical accident, which we need
not consider, the same dynasty was, after it had lost a