CHAPTER XXIV

PRUSSIA AND THE NEW CHARLEMAGNE

An eminent German historian, who has striven to say some kind words about Frederick William’s Government before the collapse at Jena, prefaces his apology by the axiom that from a Prussian monarch one ought to expect, not French, English, or Russian policy, but only Prussian policy.  The claim may well be challenged.  Doubtless, there are some States concerning which it would be true.  Countries such as Great Britain and Spain, whose areas are clearly defined by nature, may with advantage be self-contained until their peoples overflow into new lands:  before they become world Powers, they may gain in strength by being narrowly national.  But there are other States whose fortunes are widely different.  They represent some principle of life or energy, in the midst of mere political wreckage.  If the binding power, which built up an older organism, should decline, as happened to the Holy Roman Empire after the religious wars, fragments will fall away and join bodies to which they are now more akin.

Of the States that throve among the crumbling masses of the old Empire the chief was Brandenburg-Prussia.  She had a twofold energy which the older organism lacked:  she was Protestant and she was national; she championed the new creed cherished by the North Germans, and she felt, though dimly as yet, the strength that came from an almost single kin.  Until she seized on part of the spoils of Poland, her Slavonic subjects were for the most part germanized Slavs; and even after acquiring Posen and Warsaw at the close of the eighteenth century, she could still claim to be the chief Germanic State.  A generation earlier, Frederick the Great had seen this to be the source of her strength.  His policy was not merely Prussian:  in effect, if not in aim, it was German.  His victory at Rossbach over a great polyglot force of French and Imperialists first awakened German nationality to a thrill of conscious life; and the last success of his career was the championship of the lesser German princes against the encroachments of the Hapsburgs.  In fact, it seems now a mere commonplace to assert that Prussia has prospered most when, as under Frederick the Great and William the Great, her policy has been truly German, and that she has fallen back most in the years 1795-1806 and 1848-1852, when the subservience of her Frederick Williams to France and Austria has lost them the respect and support of the rest of the Fatherland.  A State that would attract other fragments of the same nation must be attractive, and it must be broadly national if it is to attract.  If Stein and Bismarck had been merely Prussians, if Cavour’s policy had been narrowly Sardinian, would their States ever have served as the rallying centres for the Germany and Italy of to-day?