* * * * *

But the war would not have come nor would it have taken the shape that it did, but for two other factors in the problem which we must next consider.  These two other factors are, first, the position and tradition of Prussia among the German States; secondly, the peculiar authority exercised by the Imperial House of Hapsburg-Lorraine at Vienna over its singularly heterogeneous subjects.

(3) Prussia.

The Germans have always been, during their long history, a race inclined to perpetual division and sub-division, accompanied by war and lesser forms of disagreement between the various sections.  Their friends have called this a love of freedom, their enemies political incompetence; but, without giving it a good or a bad name, the plain fact has been, century after century, that the various German tribes would not coalesce.  Any one of them was always willing to take service with the Roman Empire, in the early Roman days, against any one of the others, and though there have been for short periods more or less successful attempts to form one nation of them all in imitation of the more civilized States to the west and south, these attempts have never succeeded for very long.

But it so happens that about two hundred years ago, or a little more, there appeared one body of German-speaking men rather different from the rest, and capable ultimately of leading the rest, or at least a majority of the rest.

[Illustration:  Sketch 2.]

I use the words “German-speaking” and “rather different” because this particular group of men, though speaking German, were of less pure German blood than almost any other of the peoples that spoke that tongue.  They were the product of a conquest undertaken late in the Middle Ages by German knights over a mixed Pagan population, Lithuanian and Slavonic, which inhabited the heaths and forests along the Baltic Sea.  These German knights succeeded in their task, and compelled the subject population to accept Christianity, just as the Germans themselves had been compelled to accept it by their more powerful and civilized neighbours the French hundreds of years before.  The two populations of this East Baltic district, the large majority which was Slavonic and Lithuanian, and the minority which was really German, mixed and produced a third thing, which we now know as the Prussian.  The cradle of this Prussian race was, then, all that flat country of which Koenigsberg and Danzig are the capitals, but especially Koenigsberg—­“King’s Town”—­where the monarchs of this remote people were crowned.  By an historical accident, which we need not consider, the same dynasty was, after it had lost all claim to separate kingship, merged in the rulers of the Mark of Brandenburg, a somewhat more German but still mixed district lying also in the Baltic plain, but more towards the west, and the official title of the Prussian ruler somewhat more than two hundred years ago was the Elector of Brandenburg.  These rulers of the Mark of Brandenburg were a family bearing the title of Hohenzollern, a castle in South Germany, by which name they are still distinguished.  The palace of these Hohenzollerns was henceforward at Berlin.