Even yet public opinion does not realize to what an extent European Princes in the past have been made in Germany. We speak of the Royal House of Denmark as a Danish House. The Danish House is in real fact the German dynasty of Oldenburg. We speak of the House of Romanov as a Russian dynasty. And it is true that the founder of the dynasty, Michael Romanov, the son of Philarete, Archbishop of Moscow and Patriarch of all the Russias, was a typical Muscovite, and was called to the throne in 1611, in troubled times, by the unanimous voice of the people. But, as all the Czars of Russia for two hundred years only married German Princesses, _without one single exception_, the Russian dynasty had become in fact a German dynasty. So far as mere heredity is concerned, Nicholas II., through the German marriages of all his ancestors, is of German stock to the extent of sixty-three sixty-fourths, and of Russian stock only in the proportion of one sixty-fourth. II.—THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THE HOHENZOLLERN DYNASTY. Of all the German dynasties seated on the thrones of Europe, the Hohenzollern stand out, not merely as the most powerful, but also by far the most striking and the most interesting. The Hohenzollern are as unique in the history of royalty as the Rothschilds are unique in the history of finance. The history of other dynasties has been largely a history of Court scandal and intrigue, providing inexhaustible material to the petty gossip of Court chroniclers. We are all familiar with the amorous episodes of Louis XIV. and Louis XV., with the mysteries of the Grand and Petit Trianon and of the Parc aux Cerfs, with Madame de Maintenon and Madame de Montespan, with Madame de Pompadour and Madame du Barry, that beautiful courtesan who on the scaffold so pathetically asked the executioner: “Mr. Hangman, I beseech you, do spare me.” We are all familiar through Thackeray’s “History of the Georges” with the _chronique scandaleuse_ of the Hanoverian dynasty. No doubt the Hohenzollern also have had their _chronique scandaleuse_ and have also attracted the prurient curiosity of memoir writers. The Court of Berlin in the days of the polygamist King, Frederick William II., the successor of Old Fritz, was the most dissolute Court of Europe, as Berlin is to-day the most depraved city on the Continent. But somehow the scandals of the Hohenzollern seem to be irrelevant episodes. Somehow we do not think of the annals of the august House as a history of scandal. We only think of the Hohenzollern as the political necromancers of modern Europe, as the supreme masters of statecraft. The very name of the Hohenzollern recalls to our minds a race of State-builders. Machiavelli selected the House of Borgia to illustrate the principles of the statecraft of the Renaissance. A modern Machiavelli would have to go to Potsdam to study the philosophy of high politics.