can see something excusable, or at least human.  When the Kaiser encouraged the Russian rulers to crush the revolution, the Russian rulers undoubtedly believed they were wrestling with an inferno of atheism and anarchy.  A Socialist of the ordinary English kind cried out upon me when I spoke of Stolypin and said he was chiefly known by the halter called “Stolypin’s Necktie.”  As a fact, there were many other things interesting about Stolypin besides his necktie—­his policy of peasant proprietorship, his extraordinary personal courage, and certainly none more interesting than that movement in his death agony, when he made the sign of the cross toward the Czar, as the crown and captain of his Christianity.  But the Kaiser does not regard the Czar as the captain of Christianity.  Far from it.  What he supported in Stolypin was the necktie, and nothing but the necktie; the gallows, and not the cross.  The Russian ruler did believe that the Orthodox Church was orthodox.  The Austrian Archduke did really desire to make the Catholic Church catholic.  He did really believe that he was being pro-Catholic in being pro-Austrian.  But the Kaiser cannot be pro-Catholic, and, therefore, cannot have been really pro-Austrian; he was simply and solely anti-Servian; nay, even in the cruel and sterile strength of Turkey, any one with imagination can see something of the tragedy, and, therefore, of the tenderness of true belief.  The worst that can be said of the Moslems is, as the poet put it, they offered to man the choice of the Koran or the sword.  The best that can be said for the German is that he does not care about the Koran, but is satisfied if he can have the sword.  And for me, I confess, even the sins of these three other striving empires take on, in comparison, something that is sorrowful and dignified; and I feel they do not deserve that this little Lutheran lounger should patronize all that is evil in them, while ignoring all that is good.  He is not Catholic; he is not Orthodox; he is not Mohammedan.  He is merely an old gentleman who wishes to share the crime, though he cannot share the creed.  He desires to be a persecutor by the pang without the palm.  So strongly do all the instincts of the Prussian drive against liberty that he would rather oppress other peoples’ subjects than think of anybody going without the benefits of oppression.  He is a sort of disinterested despot.  He is as disinterested as the devil, who is ready to do any one’s dirty work.

The Paradox of Prussia.

This would seem obviously fantastic were it not supported by solid facts which cannot be explained otherwise.  Indeed it would be inconceivable if we were thinking of a whole people, consisting of free and varied individuals.  But in Prussia the governing class is really a governing class, and a very few people are needed to think along these lines to make all the other people act along them.  And the paradox of Prussia is this:  That while its princes and nobles have no other aim