their forefathers had transmitted to them, and
which they must transmit to their children as a national inheritance,--at
once a symbol of and a support to the national unity of the whole people,
running back to the time when, in dim and mythic ages, it emerged into
the light of history as a wandering tribe. This instinct, as a historic
fact, has been strong in all the progressive European nations; especially
strong in the Teutonic; in none more than in the English and the Scotch.
It has helped to put them in the forefront of the nations. It has been a
rallying point for all their highest national instincts. Their Sovereign
was to them the divinely appointed symbol of the unity of their country.
In defending him, they defended it. It did not interfere, that instinct
of loyalty, with their mature manhood, freedom, independence. They knew
that if royalty were indeed God's ordinance, it had its duties as well as
its rights. And when their kings broke the law, they changed their
kings. But a king they must have, for their own sakes; not merely for
the sake of the nation's security and peace, but for the sake of their
own self-respect. They felt, those old forefathers of ours, that loyalty
was not a degrading, but an ennobling influence; that a free man can give
up his independence without losing it; that--as the example of that
mighty German army has just shown an astounded world--independence is
never more called out than by subordination; and that a free man never
feels himself so free as when obeying those whom the laws of his country
have set over him; an able man never feels himself so able as when he is
following the lead of an abler man than himself. And what if, as needs
must happen at whiles, the sovereign were not a man, but a woman or a
child? Then was added to loyalty in the hearts of our forefathers, and
of many another nation in Europe, an instinct even deeper, and tenderer,
and more unselfish--the instinct of chivalry; and the widowed queen, or
the prince, became to them a precious jewel committed to their charge by
the will of their forefathers and the providence of God; an heirloom for
which they were responsible to God, and to their forefathers, and to
their children after them, lest their names should be stained to all
future generations by the crime of baseness toward the weak.

This was the instinct of the old Teutonic races. They were often
unfaithful to it--a