Sec.3. Prussia.—­This brings us to the consideration of the second and more powerful of the two Germanies—­namely, Prussia.  In order to understand Prussia and the Prussian spirit we must plunge ourselves into an atmosphere wholly different from that of the Germany that has just been described.  The very names of the two countries mark the measure of the difference.  Germany means the country of the Germans, as England means the country of the English.  But the name Prussia commemorates the subjugation and extinction by German conquerors and crusaders from the west of the Prussians or Bo-Russians, a tribe akin to the Letts and Lithuanians.  The old Duchy of Prussia, which now forms the provinces of East and West Prussia at the extreme North-East of the present German Empire, consisted of heathen lands colonised or conquered, between the thirteenth and sixteenth centuries, by a great religious and military organisation known as the “Knights of the Teutonic Order.”  While Southern and Western Germany was passing, with the rest of Western Europe, through the transition between mediaeval and modern Europe, what is now North-Eastern Germany was still in a wholly primitive stage of development, and the Knights of the Teutonic Order, with crusading fervour, were spreading Christianity and German “culture” by force of arms, converting or repelling the Slavonic population and settling German colonists in the territory thus reclaimed for civilisation.  The great British admirer of Prussia, Thomas Carlyle, in the first volume of his Frederick the Great, gives a vivid account of their activities in their forts or “burgs” of wood and stone, and helps us to realise what memories lie behind the struggle between German and Slav to-day, and why the word “Petersburg” has become so odious to the Russians as the name of their capital.  “The Teutsch Ritters build a Burg for headquarters, spread themselves this way and that, and begin their great task.  The Prussians were a fierce fighting people, fanatically anti-Christian:  the Teutsch Ritters had a perilous never-resting time of it....  They built and burnt innumerable stockades for and against:  built wooden Forts which are now stone Towns.  They fought much and prevalently, galloped desperately to and fro, ever on the alert.  How many Burgs of wood and stone they built in different parts, what revolts, surprisals, furious fights in woody, boggy places they had, no man counted; their life, read in Dryasdust’s newest chaotic Books (which are of endless length, among other ill qualities) is like a dim nightmare of unintelligible marching and fighting:  one feels as if the mere amount of galloping they had would have carried the Order several times round the Globe....  But always some preaching, by zealous monks, accompanies the chivalrous fighting.  And colonists come in from Germany; trickling in, or at times streaming.  Victorious Ritterdom offers terms to the beaten Heathen; terms not of tolerant nature, but which will be punctually