learned to fold their hands before God, we set a picture before them, we teach them to recognise the noble features; we tell them, ’This is our good King.’  Our young men, when they are of age to bear arms, look with joy and pride on the trim garb of war, and say, ‘I go in the King’s coat.’  And when the nation assembles to a common political celebration, the occasion is no Feast of the Constitution, no Day of the Bastille, no Panathenaic Festival.  It is then that we bow in reverence and loyalty before him who has allowed us to see with our own eyes that for which our Fathers dreamed and yearned, before him who ever extends the bounds of the Kingdom in Freedom, Prosperity, and Righteousness, before his Majesty the Emperor and King."[1]

[Footnote 1:  Speeches and Lectures, 3rd edition, Berlin, 1913, p. 65.  The “good King” referred to is the old Emperor William, as the address dates from 1877.]

Here, far better expressed than in the Kaiser’s speeches, we see the spirit of the Prussian Junker at its best.  It is narrow, old-fashioned, and, to democratic ears, almost grotesque.  Yet, if it survives uncorrupted by the dangers to which progress always exposes a military caste, it will not be easy either to crush by defeat or to transform by humiliation.

It is among the old Prussian nobility and the large landed proprietors in the original Prussian provinces, who have come to be known as the “Junkers,” that this spirit prevails.  They stand for the old stern repressive military discipline and unchanging Conservatism in its extremest form, regarding with well-founded suspicion and misgiving symptoms of development in any direction whatsoever.  No party in Germany acquiesced more unwillingly in the changes necessitated by her commercial and industrial development.  Even their militarism stopped short at the Army, and it required a substantial increase in the protective tariff safeguarding their agricultural interests to purchase their reluctant adhesion to the Kaiser’s policy of naval expansion.  Even now the German Navy, the pride of the commercial and industrial classes throughout the German Empire, is regarded by them with uneasy suspicion as a parvenu service, in which the old Prussian influences count for less in promotion than technical skill and practical efficiency.

The institutions of the Prussian State represent the spirit of its ruling caste.  If the German Empire is not democratic, Prussia lags far behind it.  The electoral system in use for the Prussian Lower House is too complicated to explain here.  Its injustice may be gauged from the fact that in 1900 the Social Democrats, who actually polled a majority of the votes, secured seven seats out of nearly 400.  The whole spirit and practice of the Government is inimical to inborn British conceptions of civil liberty and personal rights.  There is one law and code of conduct for officers and another for civilians, and woe betide the civilian who resists the military pretensions.  The incidents at Zabern in Alsace in 1913 are still fresh in public memory, reinforced by evidence of a similar spirit in German military proclamations in France and Belgium.  But it is important to realise that these incidents are not exceptional outbursts but common Prussian practice, upheld, as the sequel to the Zabern events proved, by the highest authority.