Prussia’s career of conquest and aggrandisement continued.  Seizing a convenient opportunity, he invaded and annexed the Austrian province of Silesia, and later joined with Austria and Russia in promoting the shameful Partition of Poland.  The old conquering and “civilising” policy of the Teutonic Knights was continued, but under new conditions and in a brutal and cynical spirit which rendered it impossible of success.  “The surest means of giving this oppressed nation better ideas and morals,” wrote Frederick the Great, in words quoted with approval by Prince Buelow, “will always be gradually to get them to intermarry with Germans, even if at first it is only two or three of them in every village.”  This spirit in Prussian policy may have extinguished the ancient Prussians, but it has not yet begun to Germanise the Poles, and has gone far to de-Germanise the Alsatians.  But it explains the utterances and justifies the sincerity of those who believe that to-day, as in the early days of her history, Prussia is fighting on behalf of “culture.”

Prussia remains to-day, what she has been for the last two centuries, an aggressive military monarchy.  “Prussia attained her greatness,” says Prince Buelow, “as a country of soldiers and officials, and as such she was able to accomplish the work of German union; to this day she is still, in all essentials, a State of soldiers and officials.”  Power rests in the hands of the monarch and of a bureaucracy of military and civil officials, responsible to him alone, and traditionally and fanatically loyal to the monarch who is, before all things, their War Lord.

The Prussian outlook is so foreign to Western habits of thought that it is well that we should try to understand it at its best.  Prussia proper has not been rich, like the rest of Germany, in poets and imaginative writers; but she is fortunate to-day in possessing in the greatest living Greek scholar, Professor von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, a man who by birth and breeding is able to put the highest interpretation upon the aims and spirit of the Prussian State.  To Wilamowitz Prussia is not only nearer and dearer than Athens.  She is better, and more advanced.  At the close of a wonderful address on “the glory of the Athenian Empire,” in which he has employed all the resources of his wide learning to paint a picture of Ancient Greece at her best, Wilamowitz breaks into this impassioned peroration:  “But one element in life, the best of all, ye lacked, noble burghers of Athens.  Your sages tell us of that highest love which, freed from all bodily entanglements, spends itself on institutions, on laws, on ideas.  We Prussians, a rough, much-enduring tribe of Northerners, may be compacted of harder stuff; but we believe that love is on a higher level when the fullest devotion to an institution and an idea is inseparably linked with an entirely personal devotion to a human being; and at least we know how warm such a love can make a loyal heart.  When our children have scarce