s Olympian serenity was
deplored by the group of hot-blooded scholars who are collectively
known as the Prussian School, and who were firmly convinced that the
principal duty of historians was to supply guidance and encouragement to
their fellow-countrymen in the national and international problems of
the time. In his gigantic work on the History of Prussian Foreign
Policy, Droysen, the eldest of the Triumvirate, calls four centuries to
witness that the Hohenzollerns alone, from their unswerving fidelity to
German interests as a whole, were fitted to restore the Empire. He
worked exclusively from Prussian archives, and history seen exclusively
through Prussian spectacles was bound to be one-sided. No student of
European history would contest the value of his researches; but his
interpretation of Prussian policy in terms of German nationalism was at
once recognized as a fundamental error, and has long been abandoned. The
second member of the group, Sybel, himself one of the three favourite
pupils of Ranke, revolted in middle life, and in his two great treatises
on the era of the French Revolution and the foundation of the German
Empire championed the policy of the Hohenzollerns and delivered slashing
attacks on France and Austria, their rivals and antagonists.

The last and greatest of the triumvirate, Treitschke, the Bismarck of
the Chair, devoted his life to a history of Germany in the nineteenth
century which occupies the same unique place in the affections of German
readers as Macaulay's unfinished masterpiece enjoys throughout the
English-speaking world. Unlike the works of Droysen and Sybel, the
_German History_ was far more than a political narrative, and presented
an encyclopaedic picture of national development. His theme was the
conflict of the forces which were promoting and opposing the
transformation of his country into a powerful Empire, and he judges men
and states by the measure in which they promoted or obstructed that
purpose. On the one side stands Prussia, feeling her way to the
realization of her historic task, on the other the middle and smaller
states, aided and abetted by the arch-enemy Austria and deeply infected
with the doctrinaire liberalism of France. Treitschke's stage is a
battlefield, with the historian looking down and encouraging his friends
with loud cries of applause. Such methods could not survive the
realization of the aim which they had done so much to assist, and with
Treitschke's