the nobility still occupy the most important charges in the administration and in the army.  The privileges of the mediatized princes consist of exemption from conscription, the enjoyment of the Principle called “equality of birth,” which prevents the burgher wife of a noble acquiring her husband’s rank, and the right to have their own “house law” for the regulation of family disputes and family affairs generally.  No increase to the high nobility of Germany can accrue as no addition will ever be made to the once sovereign and mediatized families.  With the exception of these houses the rest of the German nobility, hereditary and non-hereditary, is accounted as belonging to the lower nobility.  That part of the German aristocracy who refuse to go to court, and are accordingly called by the name Fronde, first given to the opponents of Cardinal Mazarin, in the reign of Louis XIV, consist chiefly of a few old families of Prussian Poland, Hannover (the Guelphs), Brunswick, Nassau, Hessen, and other annexed German territories, and of some great Catholic houses in Bavaria and the Rhineland.  Their dislike is directed not so much against the Empire as against Prussia.  The Kulturkampf had the effect of setting a small number of ancient Prussian ultramontane families against the Government.

Not much that is complimentary can be said of the German aristocracy as a whole.  “Serenissimus” is to-day as frequently the subject of bitter, if often humorous, caricature in the comic press as ever he was.  A few of the class, like Prince Fuerstenberg, Prince Hohenlohe, Count Henkel-Donnersmarck and some others engage successfully in commerce; many are practical farmers and have done a good deal for agriculture; several are deputies to Parliament; but on the whole the foreigner gets the impression that the class as such contributes but a small percentage of what it might and should in the way of brains, industry, or example to the welfare and the progress of the Empire.

It is difficult to communicate an impression of the Court, whether at the Schloss in Berlin or the New Palace in Potsdam, and at the same time avoid the dry and dusty descriptions of the guide-books.  If the reader is not in Berlin, let him imagine the fragment of a mediaeval town, situated on a river and fronted by a bridge; and on the bank of the river a dark, square, massive and weather-stained pile of four stories, with barred windows on the ground floor as defence against a possibly angry populace, and a sentry-box at each of its two lofty wrought-iron gates.  It may be, as Baedeker informs us it is, a “handsome example of the German renaissance,” but to the foreigner it can as equally suggest a large and grimy barracks as the five-hundred-years-old palace of a long line of kings and emperors.  And yet, to any one acquainted with the blood-stained annals of Prussian history, who knows something of the massive stone buildings about it and of the people who have inhabited them, who strolls through its interior divided into sombre squares, each with its cold and bare parade-ground, who reflects on the relations between king and people, closely identified by their historical associations, yet sundered by the feudal spirit which still keeps the Crown at a distance from the crowd, above all to the German versed in his country’s story—­how eloquently it speaks!