but they did open those avenues whereby the civilization which Germany itself had absorbed from the south and west could filter in; and the northern part of the district, that along the sea (which is the least marshy, and, as that poor country goes, the least barren), was from the close of the Middle Ages German-owned, though for some generations nominally adherent to the Polish crown.  The Polish race extended no farther northward in the present province than the lake country of its southern half, and even there suffered an admixture of Lithuanian and German blood.

That lake country well merits a particular description, for its topography has powerfully affected the war in the East; but for the moment we must chiefly grasp the political character following upon the history of this land.  The chief noble of “Borussia,” the governing duke, acquired, not from the empire nor perhaps in the eyes of Europe, but from the Polish monarchy, the title of king, and it must never be forgotten that the capital at Berlin, and the “Mark”—­that is, the frontier march—­of Brandenburg, though now the centre, are neither the origins nor the pride of the Hohenzollern power.  They were kings of Prussia because Prussia was extraneous to the European system.  There came a moment, as I have pointed out in an earlier page in this book, when the Prussian kingship and the electorate of Brandenburg coincided in one person.  All men of education know, and all men whatsoever feel, what influence an historical origin will have upon national outlook.  East Prussia, therefore, remains to-day something of a political fetish.  Its towns may be called colonies of the Germans, the birthplaces or the residences of men famous in the German story.  Its country-sides, although still largely inhabited by a population of servile memories and habits not thoroughly welded with their masters, do not take up great space in the view the German takes of the region.  He sees rather the German landowner, the German bailiff, the German schoolmaster, and the numerous German tenants of the wealthier type who, though a minority, form the chief part of this social system.  We shall see later what this miscalculation cost the great landowners during the Russian invasion, but we must note in passing that it is a miscalculation common to every people.  Only that which is articulate in the States stands out large in the social perspective during periods of order and of peace.

The Prussian royal house, the Prussian aristocracy, have then for this bastion towards the east an especial regard, which has not been without its sentimental influence upon the course of the war; and that regard is very highly increased by the artificial political boundaries of modern times.

East Prussia is, for the Germans as a whole, their rampart against the Slav; and though, beyond the present purely political and only century-old frontier, a large German-speaking population is to be discovered (especially in the towns under Russian rule), yet such is the influence of a map upon a people essentially bookish in their information, that East Prussia stands to the whole German Empire, as well as to its wealthier inhabitants, for a proof of the German power to withstand the dreaded pressure of the Russian from the East.