the policy has made her oppressive to the
Finns and the Poles--though the Russian Poles feel far less oppressed than
do the Prussian Poles. But it is a mere historic fact, that if Russia
has been a despot to some small nations, she has been a deliverer to
others. She did, so far as in her lay, emancipate the Servians and the
Montenegrins. But whom did Prussia ever emancipate--even by accident? It
is indeed somewhat extraordinary that in the perpetual permutations of
international politics, the Hohenzollerns have never gone astray into the
path of enlightenment. They have been in alliance with almost everybody
off and on: with France, with England, with Austria, with Russia. Can
anyone candidly say that they have left on any one of these people the
faintest impress of progress or liberation? Prussia was the enemy of the
French Monarchy; but a worse enemy of the French Revolution. Prussia had
been an enemy of the Czar; but she was a worse enemy of the Duma. Prussia
totally disregarded Austrian rights: but she is to-day quite ready to
inflict Austrian wrongs. This is the strong particular difference between
the one empire and the other. Russia is pursuing certain intelligible and
sincere ends, which to her at least are ideals, and for which, therefore,
she will make sacrifices and will protect the weak. But the North German
soldier is a sort of abstract tyrant, everywhere and always on the side of
materialistic tyranny. This Teuton in uniform has been found in strange
places; shooting farmers before Saratoga and flogging soldiers in Surrey,
hanging niggers in Africa and raping girls in Wicklow; but never, by some
mysterious fatality, lending a hand to the freeing of a single city or the
independence of one solitary flag. Wherever scorn and prosperous oppression
are, there is the Prussian; unconsciously consistent, instinctively
restrictive, innocently evil; "following darkness like a dream."

Suppose we heard of a person (gifted with some longevity) who had helped
Alva to persecute Dutch Protestants, then helped Cromwell to persecute
Irish Catholics, and then helped Claverhouse to persecute Scotch Puritans,
we should find it rather easier to call him a persecutor than to call
him a Protestant or a Catholic. Curiously enough this is actually the
position in which the Prussian stands in Europe. No argument can alter
the fact that in three converging and conclusive cases, he has been on
the side of three distinct rulers of dif