of necessity attract more and more the ablest men from all quarters of the empire—­the members of the imperial Diet, politicians, lobbyists, bankers, speculators and their satellites.  Along with the good, it is true, comes much of the bad.  Berlin is unquestionably the present goal for needy and unscrupulous adventurers of the worst sort.  Not a few pessimists, native and foreign, have made the fact a text for dismal prognostications of the city’s future degeneracy.  Yet this is taking a shortsighted and unjust view of things.  The great mass of the population is still sound to the core.  The unsettled state of monetary and social relations cannot but be transitory, and compulsory education and military service cannot but operate in the future as they have done in the past.  So long as the garde-corps remains what it is, the flower of the army, it will be idle to speak of the degeneracy of Berlin.  We must not forget that only five years ago, at Mars la Tour, Brandenburg and Berlin regiments fought the most remarkable battle, in many respects, of modern times.

On almost all the points above indicated Vienna is the direct opposite of Berlin.  It is not homogeneous in itself, neither is it the centre of a homogeneous empire; its population is not thrifty nor enterprising; it is Catholic, and not Protestant.  The Hohenzollerns have achieved their success by hard fighting.  With the exception of the original marches of Brandenburg there is scarcely a district in the kingdom of Prussia that has not been wrested from some enemy and held as the spoils of war.  This policy of forcible annexation or robbery, as the historian may be pleased to call it—­while inconsistent with principles of equity, has had nevertheless its marked advantages.  Perceiving that the sword alone could keep what the sword had won, the Hohenzollerns have ever striven to identify their dynastic interests with the well-being of their people, to make their regime one of order and improvement, to repress the power of the nobility without crushing its spirit, to adjust a satisfactory compromise between centralization and local independence, and to stamp their own uncompromising spirit upon each individual subject.  Hence their success in creating a nation out of provinces.  Every Prussian has always felt that he was a member of one indissoluble commonwealth.  The Habsburgs, on the contrary, have grown great through marriage.  Their policy is aptly expressed in the oft-quoted phrase, Bella gerant alii, tu felix Austria nube.  Regarding their sway as a matter of hereditary succession and divine right, they have been content to let each province or kingdom remain as it was when acquired, an isolated Crown dependency.  They have not put forth serious and persistent efforts to weld the Tyrol, the Austrian duchies, Bohemia, Galicia, much less Hungary, in one compact realm.  They have done even worse.  They have committed repeatedly a blunder which the Hohenzollerns, even in their darkest days, never so