mely allowed others, Prussian
statesmen and soldiers, with alien ideals and an alien temper, to foist
upon it, until it has become an integral part of its natural life and
consciousness. Germany has been indoctrinated and Prussianised not only
into acquiescence, but into sympathy with the policy of its rulers.

Sec.3. _Prussia_.--This brings us to the consideration of the second and more
powerful of the two Germanies--namely, Prussia. In order to understand
Prussia and the Prussian spirit we must plunge ourselves into an atmosphere
wholly different from that of the Germany that has just been described. The
very names of the two countries mark the measure of the difference. Germany
means the country of the Germans, as England means the country of the
English. But the name Prussia commemorates the subjugation and extinction
by German conquerors and crusaders from the west of the Prussians or
Bo-Russians, a tribe akin to the Letts and Lithuanians. The old Duchy of
Prussia, which now forms the provinces of East and West Prussia at the
extreme North-East of the present German Empire, consisted of heathen lands
colonised or conquered, between the thirteenth and sixteenth centuries, by
a great religious and military organisation known as the "Knights of the
Teutonic Order." While Southern and Western Germany was passing, with the
rest of Western Europe, through the transition between mediaeval and modern
Europe, what is now North-Eastern Germany was still in a wholly primitive
stage of development, and the Knights of the Teutonic Order, with crusading
fervour, were spreading Christianity and German "culture" by force of
arms, converting or repelling the Slavonic population and settling German
colonists in the territory thus reclaimed for civilisation. The great
British admirer of Prussia, Thomas Carlyle, in the first volume of his
_Frederick the Great_, gives a vivid account of their activities in their
forts or "burgs" of wood and stone, and helps us to realise what memories
lie behind the struggle between German and Slav to-day, and why the word
"Petersburg" has become so odious to the Russians as the name of their
capital. "The Teutsch Ritters build a Burg for headquarters, spread
themselves this way and that, and begin their great task. The Prussians
were a fierce fighting people, fanatically anti-Christian: the Teutsch
Ritters had a perilous never-resting time of it.... They built and burnt
innumerable stockades for and a