I do not disdain the virtues which are developed by war; but great virtues are seldom developed by war, unless the war is stimulated by love of liberty or the conservation of immortal privileges worth more than the fortunes or the lives of men.  A nation incapable of being roused in great necessities soon becomes insignificant and degenerate, like Greece when it was incorporated with the Roman empire; but I have no admiration of a nation perpetually arming and perpetually seeking political aggrandizement, when the great ends of civilization are lost sight of.  And this is what Frederic sought, and his successors who cherished his ideas.  The legacy he bequeathed to the world was not emancipating ideas, but the policy of military aggrandizement.  And yet, has civilization no higher aim than the imitation of the ancient Romans?  Can nations progressively become strong by ignoring the spirit of Christianity?  Is a nation only to thrive by adopting the sentiments peculiar to robbers and bandits?  I know that Prussia has not neglected education, or science, or industrial energy; but these have been made subservient to military aims.  The highest civilization is that which best develops the virtues of the heart and the energies of the mind:  on these the strength of man is based.  It may be necessary for Prussia, in the complicated relations of governments, and in view of possible dangers, to sustain vast standing armies; but the larger these are, the more do they provoke other nations to do the same, and to eat out the vitals of national wealth.  That nation is the greatest which seeks to reduce, rather than augment, forces which prey upon its resources and which are a perpetual menace.  And hence the vast standing armies which conquerors seek to maintain are not an aid to civilization, but on the other hand tend to destroy it; unless by civilization and national prosperity are meant an ever-expanding policy of military aggrandizement, by which weaker and unoffending states may be gradually absorbed by irresistible despotism, like that of the Romans, whose final and logical development proves fatal to all other nationalities and liberties,—­yea, to literature and art and science and industry, the extinction of which is the moral death of an empire, however grand and however boastful, only to be succeeded by new creations, through the fires of successive wars and hateful anarchies.

In one point, and one alone, I see the Providence which permitted the military aggrandizement to which Frederic and his successors aimed; and that is, in furnishing a barrier to the future conquests of a more barbarous people,—­I mean the Russians; even as the conquests of Charlemagne presented a barrier to the future irruptions of barbarous tribes on his northern frontier.  Russia—­that rude, demoralized, Slavonic empire—­cannot conquer Europe until it has first destroyed the political and military power of Germany.  United and patriotic, Germany can keep at present the Russians at bay, and direct the stream of invasion to the East rather than the south; so that Europe will not become either Cossack or French, as Napoleon predicted.  In this light the military genius and power of Germany, which Frederic did so much to develop, may be designed for the protection of European civilization and the Protestant religion.