Whom Has Prussia Emancipated?

But here is to be noted the essential difference between Russia and Prussia; especially by those who use the ordinary liberal arguments against the latter Russia has a policy, which she pursues, if you will, through evil and good; but at least so as to produce good as well as evil.  Let it be granted that the policy has made her oppressive to the Finns, the Poles—­though the Russian Poles feel far less oppressed than do the Prussian Poles.  But it is a mere historic fact, that if Russia has been a despot to some small nations, she has been a deliverer to others.  She did, so far as in her lay, emancipate the Servians or the Montenegrins.  But whom did Prussia ever emancipate—­even by accident?  It is, indeed, somewhat extraordinary that in the perpetual permutations of international politics the Hohenzollerns have never gone astray into the path of enlightenment.  They have been in alliance with almost everybody off and on; with France, with England, with Austria, with Russia.  Can any one candidly say that they have left on any one of these people the faintest impress of progress or liberation?  Prussia was the enemy of the French monarchy, but a worse enemy of the French Revolution.  Prussia had been an enemy of the Czar, but she was a worse enemy of the Duma.  Prussia totally disregarded Austrian rights; but she is today quite ready to inflict Austrian wrongs.  This is the strong particular difference between the one empire and the other.  Russia is pursuing certain intelligible and sincere ends, which to her at least are ideals, and for which, therefore, she will make sacrifices and will protect the weak.  But the North German soldier is a sort of abstract tyrant; everywhere and always on the side of materialistic tyranny.  This Teuton in uniform has been found in strange places; shooting farmers before Saratoga and flogging soldiers in Surrey, hanging niggers in Africa and raping girls in Wicklow, but never, by some mysterious fatality, lending a hand to the freeing of a single city or the independence of one solitary flag.  Wherever scorn and prosperous oppression are, there is the Prussian; unconsciously consistent, instinctively restrictive, innocently evil; “following darkness like a dream.”

Disinterested Despotism.

Suppose we heard of a person (gifted with some longevity) who had helped Alva to persecute Dutch Protestants, then helped Cromwell to persecute Irish Catholics, and then helped Claverhouse to persecute Scotch Puritans—­we should find it rather easier to call him a persecutor than to call him a Protestant or a Catholic.  Curiously enough, this is actually the position in which the Prussian stands in Europe.  No arguments can alter the fact that in three converging and conclusive cases he has been on the side of three distinct rulers of different religions, who had nothing whatever in common except that they were ruling oppressively.  In these three Governments, taken separately, one