We know so little of the Huns of the fifth century: who they were, whence indeed they came and whither they went, that it is impossible definitely to assert or to deny that the Prussians of to-day are their actual descendants. We must, it seems, give up the old theory which Gibbon took from De Guignes that this savage people were identical with the Hioung-nou whose ravages are recorded in the history of China; but of this at least it seems we may be sure, that they were a Turanian race, a race to which the Finns, Bulgarians and Magyars also belong as well as the Croatians and the Turks. Can we with any certainty claim that the Prussians also are of this family? Quatrefages has demonstrated that the population of the Prussias is by its ethnological origin essentially Finno-Slavian. In every respect, he asserts, and history bears him out, Prussia is ethnologically distinct from the peoples she now rules over under the pretence of a unity of race with them. Identity of language may mask this truth, but it cannot alter it, for the difference is real and fundamental. Teutonic Germany has accepted Prussia as its sovereign, and no one can question her right to do so; but being what she is, she has been led astray by an anthropological error. Not content with subordinating herself to these Finno-Slavs the real Germany has adopted their hatred and worked out the brutal instincts of these strangers whose iron yoke she has placed upon her nobler spirit. Her union with Prussia has been founded by the sword and by blood, cemented by war and crowned by spoliation. It is a crime not less than the crime of that Attila to whom Prussia appeals as her true and original hero, and now, as then, we have the right to believe in a divine Nemesis. What shall it profit a man if he gain the whole world and lose his own soul? It would seem, then, that as well physically as spiritually the Prussians in so far as they are Finnic[1] are of the same Turanian stock to which the Huns belonged and if only thus related to them. That the relationship is closer still a thousand things of which we are witnesses to-day, as for many hundred years past, would lead us to surmise. And if they are not the same Barbarians, their barbarism is the same. It was at any rate Attila’s name that Kaiser Wilhelm II flung across an astonished world a decade ago as the French might cry out upon Charlemagne or Blessed Joan of Arc or Napoleon. And since he has appealed to the Huns, to the Huns let him go. For us there remain these facts to be considered, if, as is so difficult, we are to benefit from the lessons of History.