d
by a free German Convention. Prussia did not want to lead the Germans:
she wanted to conquer the Germans. And she wanted to conquer other
people first. She had already found her brutal, if humorous, embodiment
in Bismarck; and he began with a scheme full of brutality and not
without humour. He took up, or rather pretended to take up, the claim of
the Prince of Augustenberg to duchies which were a quite lawful part of
the land of Denmark. In support of this small pretender he enlisted two
large things, the Germanic body called the Bund and the Austrian Empire.
It is possibly needless to say that after he had seized the disputed
provinces by pure Prussian violence, he kicked out the Prince of
Augustenberg, kicked out the German Bund, and finally kicked out the
Austrian Empire too, in the sudden campaign of Sadowa. He was a good
husband and a good father; he did not paint in water colours; and of
such is the Kingdom of Heaven. But the symbolic intensity of the
incident was this. The Danes expected protection from England; and if
there had been any sincerity in the ideal side of our Teutonism they
ought to have had it. They ought to have had it even by the pedantries
of the time, which already talked of Latin inferiority: and were never
weary of explaining that the country of Richelieu could not rule and the
country of Napoleon could not fight. But if it was necessary for
whosoever would be saved to be a Teuton, the Danes were more Teuton than
the Prussians. If it be a matter of vital importance to be descended
from Vikings, the Danes really were descended from Vikings, while the
Prussians were descended from mongrel Slavonic savages. If Protestantism
be progress, the Danes were Protestant; while they had attained quite
peculiar success and wealth in that small ownership and intensive
cultivation which is very commonly a boast of Catholic lands. They had
in a quite arresting degree what was claimed for the Germanics as
against Latin revolutionism: quiet freedom, quiet prosperity, a simple
love of fields and of the sea. But, moreover, by that coincidence which
dogs this drama, the English of that Victorian epoch had found their
freshest impression of the northern spirit of infancy and wonder in the
works of a Danish man of genius, whose stories and sketches were so
popular in England as almost to have become English. Good as Grimm's
Fairy Tales were, they had been collected and not created by the modern
German; they were a